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Young IT Workers Disillusioned, Hard to Retain
bednarz writes to mention that NetworkWorld has an interesting examination of young IT professionals and why many make unreasonable demands for their services. "'The issue managers are facing is with retention, not hiring. That means the work environment is not living up to the employee's expectation,' he says. For instance, many younger workers expect to get an office immediately or be paid at a rate higher than entry level."
participate in a job market by providing incentives!
Economists around the world are stunned. Was Adam Smith right? Were there truly rational actors within an economy?
They are all jumping on the wiki, facebook etc. bandwagon. And creating survey websites and crap like that. Why should they work for you dorkface ?
"For instance, many younger workers expect to get an office immediately or be paid at a rate higher than entry level." And pray tell, what magical career instantly gives employees fresh out of college above-entry level rates? What next, are they going to start complaining they don't get a company car and an attractive secretary to take to Hawaii?
How many truly influential people (Torvalds, Gates, Jobs, etc, etc, etc) jumped to stardom overnight? For that matter, how many upper-level IT guys and gals in big firms got there overnight? Work hard and treat the other people in your office right and it will happen for you. And most of all, make sure you don't act like this guy :)
cb_is_cool knows where his towel is.
Ouch, I think I hurt my back laughing...
Have you read my blog lately?
Yes, there are rational actors within the economy, but it seems that Young IT Professionals aren't among them.
'Old timers' get pensions and severance packages. We kids get 401(k)'s and told to manage it ourselves.
... or more like a very loosely organized union? As long as the employer has no choice but to pay, then it must be reasonable. The Internet makes it easy to know what others are making and where the money is at.
On the other side, excessive salaries will eventually benefit all the young techies in Bangalor.
At least where I work, the IT workers (myself included) are paid 40% less than the market rate so there is a reason everyone has low morale and the turnover rate is around 25% or more each year. I don't think there has been a time since I started working there in the last 4 years where there has been every position in the department actually staffed at the same time. This IT department is around 75 people.
Now, maybe that is just working for the State is not very well paying, but it is a problem affecting thousands of employees not just the younger ones. I guess when it comes down to it though, people need to get off their tails and apply for other jobs that pay more if we want to leave. The problem is often that you like the area you are living in, just not the pay rate you are making working there...
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
Many of us "millenials" may want more from our job. Is this entirely unreasonable? No. Because we have university degrees. Our parents generation often did not. We do not go into large debt and spend years getting educated in order to start out at the bottom. But there seems to be this sort of race to the bottom. Masters is the new bachelors.
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Serve your time in a cube like everyone else started in and stop your damn whining. The problem is, these are kids straight out of college who's mommys and daddys paid there way and this is thier first jobs. Only through suffering will you appreciate the door.
In the IT world, in my personal experience, you obtain raises through adding on to your skillset. With more skills, especially cutting-edge, or hard to find skills, you're worth more to the company. Once you have that skillset, you can let your employer know at your next review (ask for quarterly reviews, or at least semi-annual reviews) that you've added those skillsets and feel you're more valuable to the company. If you're not at least given some hope of a worthwhile upcoming raise (typically at your year review, not sooner) start shopping around - but don't quit or burn bridges. Once you've found a good new employer and they're willing to hire you, go back to your boss and say you'd like to stay, but need to have things adjusted. It won't be out of the blue if you've already brought up your new skillset and expectation of more pay with it. Further, you can let your boss know that the new skills you've aquired is worth X in the market now. The key is to do it politely, not with an ultimatum. Even if they turn you down and aren't willing to offer a bump in pay, be polite, ask for a reference letter (not that you're leaving, just that should they or the company of a change of staff soon, you want to make sure you've got good references), and let them know you'll be seriously considering another job offer you have (don't bluff, you must have another job lined up for this to work, otherwise you'll back down and end up looking like a liar).
Should they counter (it should be for more, not just matching), you could go to the company wanting to hire you and ask for a matching rate for what your existing employer is willing to go up to (don't ask for more than your current employer offered, that sounds greedy and doesn't leave much room for growth if you do jump ship).
Don't forget to be sure of perks, number of paid holidays/vacation days, bonuses, like healthcare, cell phone, paid home internet, company laptop, company car, etc. You might have those now, but not if you leave.
I've traded employers twice like this. As I didn't burn any bridges, I actually work for my first real major employer again, and each time I've traded up in position, title, and of course compensation.
This is part of the campaign by businesses to talk down wages. Don't fall for it. Those who run businesses are the most familiar with supply and demand and are trying to con their employees. Labour supply is tightening while demand is rising. Times are good for workers. Make the most of it since it won't last for ever. Use the opportunity to demand as much as you can from your employers and drive IT wages up as high as possible. Build up some fat for the lean years that will inevitably come.
For instance, many younger workers expect to get an office immediately or be paid at a rate higher than entry level.
Hell, I expect to be put in charge! I'm just out of college! I know EVERYTHING!!!
I think our CEO technically has an office, but it's usually being used for meetings he's not in.
I believe the only time I've actually seen non-management tech workers get a private office was the result of a fluke. Large company (several thousand employees) buys remains of relatively small company (few hundred) with a long lease on half of a very roomy building with lots of small individual offices, and underutilizes the space. As a result, the only people in the largely-desolate cube farms were temporary workers. Everyone making more than, say, $35k, got an office.
...please email marcion@....
Just kidding (I like my job).
My little Linux and tech blog
In a world of energy and resource scarcity I hardly believe moving pixels around a screen will be of any need in the present and the of course the future.
WTF? If supply for something is less than the demand, of course prices will go up.
If a younger person wants, say, $60K for an entry level job and has negotiation power (i.e. another company that pays it), then that is the entry-level payment and it means that you're paying less than what they deserve to your existing employees.
This is one of the content-free articles.
I don't think an office is unreasonable for anyone. The industry took away employee's rights one by one when there was ample supply. Now it's drying up and the workforce is asking for what belonged to them.
If managers stopped "managing" people like they are a herd and became a part of their team, I don't see why they shouldn't be able to hold on to employees as long as the pay is competitive.
echo 'cat sig | sh' > sig
Let the little bastards have a house payment, car payment and utilities and not pay check. Bet that changes their tune. Hell I'm a CPA with a Masters and 30 years experience and I still don't have an office. But my check is bigger than the guys that do so I'll gladly give up an office for more pay.
Irrational actors make good money too. Look at Tom Cruise.
I think the article has the wrong answers; speaking for 5+ years in the digital tv / set top box industry. I believe to many managers / bosses place unrealistic deadlines and projects on their engineers. Far to often have I been told "It should take just 15 minutes!" for something they have no damn clue about. This stems from the fact that most of the bosses I've dealt with are from the dot-com era, they sold the company in the past and what worked for them their they believe works today, even when the technology requirements are vastly different.
Hire good engineers and let them do their job; don't let sales take control of your development cycle and force you into unrealistic deadlines.
this is my sig, there are many like it, but this one is mine.
It isn't just IT, it can be seen in many other industries as well. It believe this is just one more example of what my generation is facing (19-30), the "something for nothing" problem.
Many of my peers expect to graduate college and start off on the same level their parents are (who have worked for 30 years). I see this both in all my peers, from the construction workers to the computer scientists. I don't believe it is unique in I.T.
The survey question was which generation is the toughest to manage... meaning at least one generation has to be the toughest. The question wasn't "Are your employees aged 18-31 tough to manage?" Since most of the managers are probably older, it is natural that the generation furthest from their age would be the toughest for them to manage. They are the most foreign in terms of experience, lifestyle, life stage, and expectations. I am in fact surprised that it was only 50% who chose the youngest generation. Given the size of the generations listed in the survey, there is most likely only 4 generations at most who are working - 18-31, 32-42, 43-53, 54-65. Given the general youth in the IT field, most of the people who have to be managed in IT will be from the younger generations, making them more likely to be the most difficult to manage. In addition the article states that 'Twenty-three percent of respondents said retaining existing staff is the top concern, while 22% said they struggle to find new qualified candidates.' If this is the case, then clearly they AREN'T paying enough, as the demand out paces supply. I find the whole tone of the summary a bit misleading.
Don't get me wrong, money is important but the environment is just as important. You have to allow leeway both in terms of environment and opportunity. I run a consulting biz and you have to allow room for the younger guys to experiment with new stuff. If you don't, they get bored no matter how much you pay them or what sort of office they have.
The real key though is to migrate the desire of the younger guys from tearing apart every new technology to the skillset of an established professional. It might be somewhat less exciting but in the end it is what customers want and what pays the bills. As your guys/gals get older and move along in life a polished skillset pays the best.
Oh, and if you're really smart, you'll achieve those long view items w/o crushing that natural curiosity out of your folks. That is, after all, what makes all of this exciting.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't this one of those signs the market is supposed to respond to?
They can't keep employees because they pay too little, but they still need the employees, leading to a pay hike?
Mind you I never took economics, but that's the way I understood the market, supply and demand.
* Could be that we got out of college and started jobs at or below entry level salaries given the economic downturn immediately after 9/11.
* Could be that 5-10 years later the market has changed so dramatically that it's unusual to even find a company with an "IT department" anymore. It's all been outsourced.
* Could be that most IT workers are tired of seeing executives get 20% raises and stock options year after year while we get flat 3% annual - or no raises at all.
* Could be that with all this automation we're still checking our Blackberries at 3 AM and rebooting servers. We're always on call (like doctors) but we don't paid like them.
* Could be that the "fun" of this industry left long ago. It's no longer hacking away at circuit boards. It's watching server farms blink.
* You want to know why employers are having a touch time retaining us? Could be that we're smart enough to realize the "traditional" career of an IT professional is all but gone and the only real career paths left are through management (hence folks skipping the certifications and going for the MBAs). Alternatively, consulting still proves lucrative. But to chide us because we know that the "IT professional" career is dying is silly.
That's because you are what is called "book smart" right now. Anyone, in any industry can tell you that people fresh out of school, find out they learn more in the first months on a real job, than they did in years of school.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Ben
I think just as it is the right of a company to set their prices I should be able to set mine. Maybe this manager doesn't have the resources to support the type of work he needs done. As a somewhat young worker in the IT / programming area this man proclaiming I am not worth what I am getting paid is outrageous. Especially now that retiring programmers and the legacy of code they leave behind. There will be fewer to replace them and more to do, these guys deserve to be able to set any price they please as far as they can find someone willing to pay it. So in short anyone who complains that the cost of what they need to function is too much I think they can't afford it to begin with.
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
Companies keep expecting to get more work done with less workers, which I think is the root of the problem. I am a techie that has been looking for a decent job for ages mostly because of this.
I'm sorry, but making 50% of what the person who is my boss is making, and doing 99% of the work dosent jive with me. My last job had some old suit in charge that knew nothing about the job, which ment I was basicly doing all of my work, then helping him with his. I told his boss how I felt about it and was basicly told to take a hike.
Some of the younger programmers really don't want to work in an inflexible office environment. Absenteeism is pretty high where I am now, and that's a contract that pays pretty well. And they want their web mail, IM's and iPhones. Cut off internet services they want and you'll lose them.
They don't do office hours, don't like cubicles and want their toys. But if you can work with them on those issues, they are capable of producing some amazing work. The best project I ever worked we set up an office in the corner of a warehouse, walled it off with fence panels and white boards, collected old furniture and used shelf grates for desks. We had a basketball hoop, frig, microwave, satellite TV and our own DSL. Plus we'd stay late and play games after hours. No one quit on that project and we worked some long hours toward the end.
You don't really have a lot of options. You can deal with them or outsource to someplace that doesn't speak English as a native language and works in an office that's open in what's the middle of the night for you. They're not going to work in a cubicle so just deal with it and adapt. You're better off giving them an empty, unfinished room and give them money to punk it out to their own taste.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Having endured "tech-support" for a few of my early career years I can understand why these guys want a few things. After a few panicky phone calls which often go like this "Hello?" "OHMYGOD!!! I CAN'T FIGURE THIS OUT!! I HAVE A DEADLINE!! YOU HAVE TO COME OVER!!" And so you schlep over to the moron's..(*cough*)... USER's cube and on their screen is displayed "Press OK to continue." "WHAT DO I DO?!??!" Ummm...gee...how about we try clicking the OK button? Bottom line especially in Fortune 500 companies is that people don't want to learn how to use the computer because they'd then be held responsible for it. But it's a double-edged sword too. They'd all beg and plead for more training. What they meant was they wanted training on the major applications they were using like Photoshop. What management gave them was "team training"...so they could bitch in unison.
I think that the root cause is lack of knowledge. In many pre-job situations, being able to install XP from scratch was a good feat, knowing your way around BASH was considered amazing and when you could set up a wireless router in 2 minutes people thought that you were a tech genius. Until you start working at a tech-job you don't know that the things that amazed your friends really made no difference in the real world. When you came out of college they knew Python and Perl along with C and Java and in the eyes of their friends they were 1337 Hax0rs, then they go get a tech job where either they don't code much, or everyone has a working knowledge of code. To some less-informed people, just using a non-MS OS such as Linux or knowing the command line on OS-X instantly made you some sort of star, you go to your job and everyone knows Linux and UNIX. Everyone thinks they have talent... Until they find someone who can do the exact same thing better then them.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
I started college this fall at a small liberal arts school. As a kid I grew up putting together computers from spare parts, tinkering and ultimately trying to get a linux desktop to run at a reasonable rate. In that time I've watched the kernel grow up - my first Debian install barely had sound drivers and it took next to forever to get those pesky binary Nvidia modules to compile & load correctly. As the years went I became more interested in being able to do things with my computers rather than to them. I left highschool with an interest in biology and psychology, regardless of the fact that everyone knew me as the computer nerd.
Enter first semester Comp Sci. 101 (I thought it would be a good idea). I talked to several of my friends in the class and several of them pointed out to me that Comp Sci majors had a higher median salary out of school than biology research assistants. It absolutely boggled me that kids who had never explored a computer on their own were so confident that they could go out and make the big bucks in the real world.
I'm not sure where this rant is going - I feel like my generation (the Facebook generation? ugh.) of hackers view computers more as a functional tool than something to make work in of itself. I would rather do cool things with Blender than spend 2 hours hacking my kernel to make it run faster, for instance. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see fewer and fewer impassioned and technologically savy students get degrees in Computer Science itself rather than using self-taught computer science techniques in other research fields.
At least the war on the environment is going well
1988 wants its story back.
Seriously...the media trots out this "Younger generation wants more" story every 5-10 years. They certainly did twenty years ago, when I was one of those hard-to-please kids.
Nothing's changed. Employers pay crap wages at the entry level, and treat young kids like crap. Said young kids then hop jobs until they find something better. Same as it ever was. When I was that age, I quickly found that without experience, jobs I could get were pretty sucky. I also soon found that it was much easier to get a raise by job-hoping. So I spent the first ten years of my career moving around until I got the experience to get a good job.
The younger generation isn't any different. It's always like this, because entry level jobs tend to be the suckiest and companies that employ lots of entry level coders also tend to be the suckiest. If a company doesn't like their people switching jobs, they should pay more, and stop treating them like crap. Of course, so companies *do* do that. They're the ones people job hop to and then stop.
The cake is a pie
In Australia we have ads on tv for "IT Colleges" (term used very loosly) that say the average IT salary is $89,000. It's nowhere near that amount (closer to half) for your average programmer, lighly more for a good sysadmin.
I personally don't know why people want to climb that high that quickly, I look forward to honing my programming skills over the next 15-20 years (though I do work for an excellent employer, so that may help).
If they couldn't get a job with those expectations, they wouldn't make those demands. What this means is that the level has gone up, but some employers don't want to accept it. If they want to hire some people in India for a third the wage, and not even a cubicle, they can do it. Otherwise, shut up, and pay your employees properly or fold up and wait for the next recession.
I learned to program computers before I learned to walk. I taught myself C++ before I reached high school. I graduated (with my BS in CS) at the top of my class and with honors. I thought my code was nothing short of awesome.
Then I learned that real-world, reliable, professional code that clients would actually pay for required something more rigorous than my school projects and hobby computer games. My arrogance blinded me to the fact that my raw talent simply wasn't enough to cut it in the real world...what I needed was good old-fashioned experience (and maturity of style).
I used to say the exact sort of thing you said. "Is this entirely unreasonable? No. Because we have university degrees." But real world failures (and successes) showed me precisely why a lot of employers don't respect university degrees.
Don't get me wrong, the academic education is valuable. I have worked with programmers who do not have degrees, and I have seem them fail in areas where I succeeded precisely because of my education. It is definitely valuable, and gives an advantage. But it is simply not a substitute for real professional experience. Not by a long shot.
You aren't as good as you think you are. Your degree doesn't put you as high on the totem pole as you think it does. You must earn your way up to the top, just like everyone else. And THAT is reasonable.
Does anyone complaining about "young IT professionals" understand that they have a high turnover rate because these professionals find opportunities elsewhere? If the high turnover rate affects the bottom line, then these executives need to stop bellyaching and adapt to the situation. Once someone has enough experience to move to a better job, it might be time to promote them or improve their working environment. At the very least, management must take into account the proper compensation for each employee they want to retain. Complaining about the ones who leave or making excuses that blame generational shortcomings is bad management practice.
Just callin' it like I see it.
You will soon realize experience and connections often count much more than education when it comes to employment.
I am not trying to bash the value of a university education - I certainly d o not regret my degree. But back in 2003, when I graduated, there is absolutely no way I would have gotten the position I am currently in without the connections I had at the company. If i did not have these connections at the time I would have had to start much more "at the bottom" and would likely not be doing as well as I am currently.
The sooner young people learn how the business world really works the better. Your education means nothing compared to your competition's weekly golf game with his manager. Get out there, go to user groups and community events, socialize with business people in your area. Don't waste your whole university life studying and partying - make as many business connections as you can while in school so you will be prepared when you graduate.
"Young IT Workers Delusional, Hard To Retain"
There, fixed that for you...
Has nobody ever heard of "paying your dues" anymore?
I'm only wearing black until they come out with something darker.
The article raises some very good points about the upbringing of individuals today, and how it is affecting their expectations of what a workplace is supposed to be like. I'd say this is heavily accentuated in the IT industry, given that most young people these days that are proficient with computers had parents that could afford them. That being the case, it is logical to assume that these people have had a mostly sane upbringing. As with everything, of course, there are exceptions.
Being a 21 year old working in a datacenter, I've already had my falsely high expectations thoroughly crushed by the reality of the situation. From my experienced, the reality is: unless you're extremely intelligent, talented, and well versed in whatever it is you're being paid to do, don't expect at all start treatment for being young and managing to get a job in IT. As the article pointed out, if your skill set is intermediate to advanced (with the top being: fucking brilliant), you're going to get the usual treatment everyone else has had: you find a place that you enjoy (this is tricky sometimes), and stick with it. While you're there, if at all possible, learn as much as your brain can soak up, and then spruce up the resume, and move on.
The true challenge that I've found is actually moving up within the same company. Most places love to tout how they hire and promote from within, but this is really a challenge. I've found it much easier to simply move onto another company with my acquired knowledge, and get my salary raises that way.
By this point, I'm rambling, but in the end, this is just the way it will be until we "millennials" become in charge of everything. Then, things might change. Or, we may just mature to the point where the cycle repeats itself with another younger generation working beneath us.
Your mom must be very proud.
They're complaining that people are doing just that.
Hell I'm a CPA with a Masters and 30 years experience and I still don't have an office.
With 30 years experience I'm sure you know this, but for everyone new to the idea: Offices are only for people who have a business need to have private meetings. No one else needs an office, that's just a waste of space and roadblock to collaboration. I used to work on a production floor where some of the senior machinists made more that the managers in their offices. Skilled workers don't have a need for an office so they don't get one, while even very junior company infrastructure types (management, HR, etc.) frequently need to be able to shut the door and have a discussion with someone.
We are all just people.
and the most depressing thing about entering the workforce for me is how hard it is to get your foot in the door anywhere. I have absolutely no problems starting at the bottom and working my way up, but there doesn't seem to be many places out there that are willing to hire straight out of the gate. Go do a search on Monster or Dice in any major metropolitan area (or anywhere else for that matter) for entry-level positions and I guarantee you won't find more than one to two positions, if that.
I can certainly understand that, considering that the vast majority job postings consist of "Must have 5+ years of exp. with (extremely specific) technologies A, B, & C" as well as a wide swath of skills that are generally only picked up on the job. The companies that complain about not being able to find qualified candidates are often the same companies that outsource all of the entry-level jobs to India.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
From my experience retaining staff relates to job satisfaction and salary. Some people weigh more on salary than job satisfaction vice versa. Once job satisfaction begins to decline or never meets expectation or a rise in salary is outweighed by external factors (for example, they can get better elsewhere) then why would/should people stick around?
For a young IT professional to progress they need to make themselves known to management early, especially the senior ones and try get involved in as many things as possible, stay positive and give it some time. If that doesn't work then with their foot in the door - build skills, go on all the training possible, after a while if they're not getting job satisfaction or a reasonable salary jump ship. I always see hotshots out of uni believing they know everything. Watching their ego get popped is funny and admit I went through that stage and learned to play the game. I think they just need to understand that it was okay not to know everything and they weren't going to get their arse kicked in that early stage.
We had some 2nd year uni students in the UNIX area, all they did was change tapes, write shell scripts add/create users and passwords, was it no wonder why they were dissillusioned after a year. Regardless, they left to complete uni and try their luck elsewhere only to want to come back after that, I think salary was the driving factor. One of them that came back is basically running that area now.
Perception, especially to managers is everything. So what if you made the code go faster, if the people making the decisions or even your manager doesn't see the benefit you'll be lucky to get a "good work junior".
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
My last employment was terminated in April of 2007 where I earned $35,000 cdn/year.
I was hired in December of 2006 to follow a software development plan to implement a visualization suite which allowed building developers to visualize housing before construction to show potential buyers, city planners, etc..
The software development was in Microsoft Visual C++ 2003 using OpenSceneGraph, XML based configuration and skinning, used OpenThreads and had TCP based network sessions for live or pre-recorded guided tours.
When I was hired, I replaced an intermediate software developer that could no longer get along with the director (immediate supervisor). There was a senior programmer above me but he left by mid-January of 2007, but before he did I was told the development team was going to be expanded to 3 full time developers. We had a graphics artist who used tools like 3D Studio Max to visualize the buildings from architectural blue-prints (or floor plans if you prefer).
Just after the senior programmer left, I started going through all of the modules to get an idea of what would need to be done to prepare the rendering engine for the development plan which had been presented to me. I found that whenever a HUD button was being pressed a new thread was being launched. In fact if you pressed the 'move forward' button twice quickly, the camera would jump back and forth between two positions because two threads were being launched without mutexes or any other safe-guard. I also noticed that nearly all class data members were public and being affected from other classes. And finally that the event processor had code that depended on the event be associated to a HUD button.
So I made recommendations to decouple the modules, fix the event model & processor as well as eliminate the excessive threading which was not making things faster as the unexperienced multi-threading programmer who implemented them had obviously assumed.
When I presented these recommendations to the director he laughed in my face and began yelling at me when I tried to explain why these changes would be necessary. So I backed off after the president of the company heard us out and decided to back the director who had been there longer than I.
At the beginning of April I was falling behind the schedule because of problems directly associated to the event model where the software development plan called for events to be generated by the camera walking through tagged plains. As mentioned, the event processor contained code which read fields from a HUD button which had to be present, so I was trying to emulate a button's state but the events would run in a continuous loop. While struggling with emulating the button states properly there was construction crew in our new office building during the day and my director was having (business?) friends in the office in the evening to drink wine and chat within earshot of my cubicle.
In my last few days of my employment, in early April of 2007 I started going into the office in the late afternoon to ensure at least 4 hours of my 8 hour shift had no distractions since my employers who told me when I was hired that my hours of work were flexible as long as they amounted to 8 hours a day. They decided to fire me without telling me why, though I expect it had to do with my decision to go in during the evening to avoid the distractions during the day. Up until that point I had never handed in any work late. Get this, they still had not hired any other developer, so I was the only programmer left when they terminated my employment.
I have been unemployed since April 2007 (we're now in January of 2008) despite looking for work at junior and intermediate levels, software development, testing, maintenance, help desk support, etc, etc..
In my years of IT work I've found management to be incompetant, not at technical skills but soft skills. It sounds as though the new generation of IT workers have been informed of what kind of crap happens in thes
as a "millenial" just starting out from college into IT, this article definitely hits on (or rather, somewhat near) an interesting dimension of my experience in the workforce. i'm confused, though, by the negative tone of TFA.
i'm currently working at a company where the turnover rate is rather incredibly high, with a huge percentage of temp/contract employees in the office (including myself). i am, modestly speaking, wicked overqualified for the phone-jockey work i'm doing now, and probably won't take any of the several relatively lucrative permanent positions i've been offered with the company.
thing is, i would have been perfectly happy to stick it out and rise in the company--as i'm sure many others would, too--if it weren't for one thing: the company is moving. they're relocating to a state where it's cheaper to operate, and probably dozens of younger techs like myself simply can't make that kind of shift. thus, half the office (most in that millenial age group) where i'm working has either fled, is fleeing, or will flee as the company relocates. turnover isn't a generational thing, it's just a result of this kind of fluidity in an industry, where everybody is outsourced to or contracted by somebody else at every level of the game.
that example aside, the fact remains that younger people in any industry are often in less secure/stable positions as far as their personal and professional lives, and have to hop between jobs, or have other commitments--like education--in ways that can interfere with keeping one job for a long time. an older worker is likely to be more settled and able to stay with one employer for a longer time. in IT, because there are so many opportunities available in the field. it's an employee's market, so job hopping is more easily do-able, and often even helps to build a diverse and attractive resume.
i'm sure the situation is rather different for people my age who come into the industry with jobs higher up the IT totem pole, where depth of experience means more than breadth, but down in the trenches i there's more to think about in terms of turnover among the young and fresh than just "the brats are spoiled".
i mean, yeah, we are spoiled, but we're not all verucca salt.
/. is what happens when geeks talk. get used to it.
If salary is making them hard to retain it means that other companies are hiring at that rate. Although the managers could be fighting something that is difficult to compete with. With the increase of published national average salaries for proffessions a lot of people expect to get the average rate. Two things count against them with this there is little differentiation between entry level and experienced with the same title.(I had senior strapped on the front of my title 10 days out of college) The other thing at play could be that regional salary rates are much different from the national average. Areas with generally higher cost of living tend to have generally higher salaries. This causes an increase in the national average. This kind of factor in salaries are rarely explained in articles that give salary estimates. These factors lead to expectations that may be higher than what the local market can bare. Some large companies have a tendency to price entry level salaries a little lower because they are expecting that the benefits of working(training, experience, stability) for them out way the lower salary. However as budgets tighten up as we approach a possible recession the benefits of working for them are reduced and there is bound to be a little friction at the lower than market salary.
This signature would be better if I was creative.
If there's more demand for workers than there is supply, those who're around can make more and more demands while companies wishing to hire them can either pay that or go out of business for lack of product. Again, over time, salaries and conditions will change, in this case improving, until equilibrium is reached due to increased supply (high salaries attract more people to the field) and reduced demand (companies can no longer make a profit at those costs and stop trying).
Either way, though not a static equilibrium, basic supply and demand implies that salaries will generally regulate relative to the value society places on them.
What doesn't make sense, is the argument, "Both sides need to meet in the middle!" If the young coders are asking too much, ignore them, they'll get hungry and come begging. If the young coders are actually asking a totally reasonable price, given how in demand their jobs are, what's the problem?
And that, to me, is really the crux of this: It sounds more like bitching that, "It wasn't like that in my day! We were lucky to get paid six pence a week to write COBOL!" So what if it was? So what if you don't like how in favor of the young coders the market is these days? If it's such an issue, don't hire them. If you want them badly enough that you are willing to pay what they demand, don't have your actions show that willingness then bitch about that reality.
The reverse is also true: If you're a coder and you think you're entitled to more than you're getting, you need to ask yourself why you're not getting it. Think you deserve an office, a car, expense accounts, 401ks and stock but you're not getting it? Well, if you merit it, why are you sitting here bitching about it rather than in the next job that'll apparently willingly reward you for it?
It's a free country. Employers can [pretty much] employ at will. Employees can [pretty much] be employed at will. That's a pretty good sign supply and demand is allowed to work and everyone's getting roughly what they should get. Look at how fast the dotcom boom came (maybe two years) and how fast it went (six months) - that's another great sign the market regulates pretty quickly. Don't like it? Wait six months. The whining about how things should be is just that - whining.
Well, we've had good evidence since at least 1987 that offices do significantly improve productivity. I've worked in both a cube farm, and an office (with a door!), and not only is the office far more productive, I go home happy every night. I'd never work in a cube farm again.
If you want to hire people straight out of college and put them in an environment which is known to lower productivity and increase frustration, why would anybody want to work for you? No wonder you've got retention issues! This is not a case of graduates being greedier than the older people; this just means they've read a book or two about programmer productivity.
FWIW, the place I am now (where programmers have offices) has never had an employee quit. The cube farm I worked in lost more than 1 employee per month, on average (on a team of about 10, nobody had ever stayed longer than 2 years, and almost nobody lasted a year). Also, about 30% of the team, at any given time, had been in the hospital in the past year for heart trouble -- make of that what you will.
That's not to say that cube farms were the sole cause of the problems, but they are the most striking symptom. If you're trying to save a few pennies by the false economy of stuffing your programmers in a cube farm, you're probably screwing over your programmers in many other ways, and today they're smart enough to know it. When we see our classmates selling webpages to big companies for billions of dollars, you can no longer say "we're IBM (or Xerox, or whatever), and this is the top programming job!" and have people believe you.
You're not competing with IBM any more. You're competing with startups. You think Facebook got started in a cube farm? Fuck that. Paul Graham was right about this, at least: good programmers are going to get more of what they deserve, not because old companies are going to improve, but because old companies that don't are going to die.
I think part of the reason younger works move around is simply because they don't have the experience to know what they want and what to expect, and little invested in their current position. I don't think moving around a little to gain that experience and find the right match is necessarily bad.
The recurring story is that 'Millennials' have all these outrageous, inflated expectations and their 'reasonable' employers just don't know what to do about it. If their expectations are really so out of proportion, then eventually they will have to settle for what they're actually worth and employers have nothing to complain about. On the other hand, if that potential employee can find what he or she actually wants somewhere else, well then that employer is just going to have to compete for them! It's all supply and demand just like any other transaction.
If one is entry level in a field where a degree is now required, (such as IT), one is entitled to entry level pay and benefits, regardless of what one's parents generation received when they entered the field with its requirements at that time. If one thinks one is underpaid, one has the option of obtaining employment elsewhere. If all employers are underpaying, then one has misjudged one's market value.
Conversely, employers having trouble retaining staff may well be underestimating their employees market value, and almost certainly made a utility misjudgment somewhere.
It's certainly possible to misjudge one's market value -- there's a good deal of misinformation out there, most accidental, some quite possibly purposeful, however, by those attempting to manipulate labor supply.
But consider this: entry level lawyers don't get paid what joe call center gets paid for his entry-level job. IT is, ostensibly anyway, a skilled and specialized field. There may not be arcane magic to every aspect of it, but experience and training count. Someone has to bear the cost for that training, and if employers want people who know their stuff and stick around, they'd best be prepared to pony up for it rather than trying to externalize that cost.
No, IT isn't as hard as a law degree, but it's not janitorial work either. And I have heard, with my own ears, management complaining about how hard it is to find workers who accept "entry level" -- sub $30k -- and wonder why there's such turnover among those employees they do manage to land. This while rewarding new management talent (with questionable record of delivering, other than being able to keep labor costs down) $20k raises.
The labor pool in IT, if it's actually shrinking at all, is shrinking for a reason and will continue to do so -- until it's opened to a pool of workers who consider prevailing compensation rewarding, or until the prevailing compensation rises.
Or, more cynically, until someone manages to convince enough people that IT is in fact such a rewarding occupation that they'll sink enough resources into training that they're in little position to do much else.
Tweet, tweet.
Ok... I am a milli-grad. well post grad. and here is my experience :
I joined a Fortune500 company (wont name it, but it is in the wireless industry). I was paid nice (competitive) salary, good bonus structure and had my own office. But, the place needed someone who would mechanically do what the "boss" told me. Even a question of "why" would get me the brand of slacking newbie. I tolerated this for 3 years, and left!
Now, i work for a startup, share cubicles and am paid lower compensation - but, i will willingly come and work for my boss on weekends
you wanna know why : I am a human with an opinion here. May be none of my thoughts are assimilated.... but, at least i get a debate and more often than not, i am convinced. I now realize it is more important to work for a boss who wants a cheap human than a cheap boss who wants an expensive toy.
ask my old boss, and i am sure he will have a few choise words about me >)
i aint no toy! not for a 100K salary.... gimme a mil and we will think about it.
S
My team is currently looking to fill 2 positions. I've been doing phone interviews for the past 6 weeks and the low quality of applicants truly scares me. People with a BS and 2 to 5 years of industry experience who cannot even tell me how to remove the last node from a linked list are a dime a dozen. To say nothing of the people who don't even know what a linked list is! The other day I got all excited because an applicant actually knew what the atoi function does. I usually have to explain this to candidates (and most of them fail to understand). And they want offices? I'm not even sure they should be given access to computers!
IT is basically a dead-end or 'last resort' job, for the people who can't cut it as an engineer or even a programmer.
You get your start pulling cable, reinstalling windows, fiddling with 'open source', creating useless 'mashups' and maybe some web pages.
It's mostly data entry, manual labor, and other brain dead tasks.
After that, there's really nothing much more. Maybe being a 'webmaster' or an entry level programmer, or some basic data entry.
The 'old guard' of IT, the former engineers and programmers are reluctant to give any real responsibility to the younger generation, and frankly, with the level of education the average IT worker has, I don't blame them.
Get out of IT, get a real education, with a real degree, and then trump up whatever cable pulling and router rebooting you did at your IT job , and get a real position.
Um that's bullshit and you know it.
A senior machinist is most likely in charge of other machinists. Which means there will be times when he needs to have private discussions with those people about policies, or failure to follow policies. Senior machinist will also have more direct paper work to sort through that the regular floor guys don't need to see, or shouldn't see.
A senior machinist will need a large desk, and a small office, Possibly he can share them with other senior machinists but they will need a private place to talk with those underneath them.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
That's not to say that recent graduates cannot immediately contribute significantly to their company.
My first few months out of college were rather somewhat unproductive since they felt it more important to take weeks of training on their various products and such. However, when I was able to be mentored with the usual work of the group it wasn't long before I noticed something...
"You mean whenever we start working on an issue we do these same series of steps on these same various servers in this particular order?"
I had that automated in short order.
Trouble is, people seem to forget the real lesson of college. What you learn in the university is nowhere near as important as learning how to learn. And sadly, if you don't capitalize on that lesson, it won't do you any good.
(I can never forget that one "oldie" who literally told me to read man pages for breakfast, from A to Z. He also told me it was my mission to become superuser. Ah the days...)
You can never and should never stop learning.
The very best piece of advice someone gave me while interviewing before I got out of college was that you must work extremely hard your first few years. You want to work harder than your peers and as soon as possible to become the most productive in your team.
I followed this advice and found it dovetailed just fine with continued learning. I just had to make certain not to fall into a treadmill routine. If I always made sure to allocate a fair chunk of time (10 to 20%) to trying to learn new things and trying to find faster ways of doing things, my productivity continued to grow. That's because the more productive I was, the more I could create free time to learn new things.
I was a good IT worker that worked 7x24 to keep things running smoothly since downtime=money. However the suits took over and decided that they were infinately more important that the technology people delivering services and making money. Then Ralph an ex-AT&T exec we had just hired told me that the 'purpose of "stock-options" was not to make employees rich'. Ralph was right, he got his stock options and left in search of another victim/company.
:). I am teaching now and coach my own FIRST robotics team, the satisfaction is much, much higher. Not working 7x24 is nice too, especially with summers off.
So, 4-years ago, I took my ball and went home. This year (4.5-years after leaving) I got a call from an ex-senior manager asking to come back at a high salary, but I couldn't negotiate 3-months vacation so I turned it down
The situation that the suits created is only going to worsen. When the salaries of TOP TECHIES are equal to that of directors and VP's again, I will consider going back. We work just as hard and we are required to know the business end to end, keep things agile, and be smart everyday.
The complexity of the modern world increases everyday and it is built on technology. I would encourage all technies to work hard, but continue to have high expectations and demand respect and compensation. You are worth it! Most CEO's aren't.
No, the reason is plain management stupidity, that wants to be cheap and has to have something over the peons they manage just to show they are above them.
Or, people who have a business need to shut out the world every now and then and concentrate, or people who have a business need to work with expensive or confidential stuff which they don't want to trust to a filing cabinet lock, etc.
Collaboration is a really nice sounding word, but ultimately collaboration, distraction, and gossip are just different products of the exact same thing.
How often do we here, "If you don't like your job - QUIT already!"
So we do just that, and the six and seven-figure salaries in management still feel violated.
I say f- them. Either pay more, or quit complaining about our right to leave.
I suggest you read Slashdot
by well-meaning educators, parents, and public figures for most of their youthful lives.
College is your ticket out of the ghetto, means a higher income, better work conditions, more freedom, more control over your career, more respect, blah, blah, blah. It's true in a way, but the way a university education is described is often as the opposite of blue-collar work. That is to say that many kids are told (I know I was, all the way up through the end of undergrad) that I was going to college to avoid certain things:
- Being poor
- Having to get paid for what I "do" rather than what I "think"
- Being stuck in a "dead-end job"
- Having to "flip burgers," "answer phones," "make copies," or other "menial labor" work
- Low pay (this is a biggy, and you hear it over and over and over)
Well... all of these things are exactly what you confront when you finish your bachelor's degree. I know it was a tremendous shock to me after having been goaded on for years to get good grades in high school, then to go to college, then to hang in there—goaded using all of these reasons for sticking with it—only to find out that college doesn't provide you with wealth, the ability to get paid for what you think, a way to avoid dead-end jobs, having to start at the absolute entry level, or getting paid nothing for all of the above... The only way up the career ladder is to climb it, from the bottom.
It's the "all kids must go to college" culture that we have—we even direct kids away from the things they're interested in in many cases using these kinds of arguments (which are really veiled threats in a way of what consequences await them if they don't go to college) and then they graduate expecting exactly the benefits that have been used as selling points for all these years.
I can completely empathize. It took me a good five years to come to terms with the fact that I'd essentially been had and would now need to choose between going out and starting up the career ladder as if I'd just graduated high school with essentially no advantage, or going to grad school on the other hand (i.e. school for many more years and at great expense) to gain at least some measurable advantage for myself with all the hard work I'd done.
I chose the latter, but I often reflect on the fact that I could easily have chosen the former as well... there was certainly a point in my life where it could have gone either way.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I've worked in all settings, even had an office (that I was often not in) for well over a decade. My experience is that it's not the office, and it's not the cubicle that generates the most overall group productivity for programmers, but rather the "open lab". I.e., "the pit".
The programmers quickly learn to tune out the noise, and only attend to what's relevant, like someone calling out their name. Humans are good at that.
C//
If your job included duties like programing where you you have to keep a lot in your mind at one time a private office would seem more of a work requirement than a nicety.
I would clear out a large (or medium sized, the LCD monitor won't take up much space) broom closet for an IT worker that is expected to produce working code, even if it is just maintenance scripts.)
If interruptions do not cause you to be an order of magnitude less efficient than you can happily do with out an office, many top producing sales people prefer not to have an office, or if they do have one they want a fishbowl (glass walls to the hallway).
I don't get this idea of hiring people and then not giving the an environment that the can do the job you are paying good money for.
Work bio at MMWD
here = hear
I suggest you read Slashdot
My company has been hiring recently and as a result I have had to be part of a lot of screening calls and/or in-person interviews. I've come to the conclusion that a lot of you just plain suck! That or our HR filtering process does...
:-)
Most likely the really high quality people are already snagged up by top companies either right out of school or based on open source type work that's gotten them noticed. Everyone right below that level gets a job at some point, stands out and moves steadily upwards.
The rest, and seemingly the vast majority I encounter in interviews just plain are not very good. I don't know if it's too easy to get computer related degrees or certificates or what, but despite many an impressive sounding resume I have been disappointed time and time again with someone who maybe can handle a GUI and memorizing a few steps, but lacks the fundamental understanding of the underlying technology they are supposedly a specialist with that would enable them to actually troubleshoot and/or innovate.
So, I have another angle on this complaint. Maybe you're not as nerdly as you think and you should consider a different line of work.
Or perhaps before they start providing incentives, they start by treating their employees like humans instead of freaking line item expenses.
Why the hell should I work 70 hour weeks, kill myself outside of a job to learn the latest tech, deal with idiot management and unreasonable schedules when the company would gladly lay me off to save $5?
Treat people like cattle, and you get a bunch of people just biding time until the grass is greener elsewhere.
No only isn't it "necessarily bad", I think it is a positivly Good Thing (TM). Moving around gives a graduate a range of experiences on both the technical level (develop skills etc) but also a range of experiences with various people and ways of working & doing business. All of this helps create a well rounded and skilled professional when then start to grow up and remain longer in jobs.
However, if you're an employer who wants to spend peanuts then you should expect to get either
- Someone with little experience (who will leave when they see they've developed skills someone will actually pay for)
- someone who can't get a better gig right now and promises to remain for ages (but won't)
- someone who can't get a job with better conditions because they are actually worth the little you pay, or maybe worth a little less
- A mixture of the above
Bottom line is - if you pay peanuts you get monkeys. Some monkeys will develop well and you should treat their tenure as a bonus. The monkeys you wish would leave, won't; and then you've got to consult your local labour lawsAnd these young IT workers have probably seen, memorized and worshiped Office Space. Did they really expect anything different because they're so smart and have their shiny Microsoft certificates?
I've worked IT a long time and recently left the age range mentioned in TFA (18-31), but I've also lived in reality a long time. Getting fat pay, nice working accommodations and other perks can happen for (relatively) inexperienced workers, but it's not the norm. Just like most jobs in the world, you generally have to work your way up to that level.
:q!
If young people do develop a sense of responsibility, they are still not going to take jobs. They are going to take over. It is every young generation's manifest destiny to take over from the older generations, eventually. But there are rites of passage. Those older guys know more than you do. They are tougher, meaner, smarter, more experienced, better talkers, better programmers, better negotiators, better strategists, etc.., than their younger colleagues. They are like this because they have been at it a lot longer. You will take over as they retire off and/or as you become experienced enough to outsmart and outcompete them. Again, there are no shortcuts.
So stop being a spoiled brat and go do the grunt work. You aren't yet up to the task of the higher profile stuff. You will know when you are up to the task, because you will take over. Until then, you are just flapping your lips. And no, you aren't worth the same amount of money as someone that has been doing the job for 20 years. In all likelihood, if you disappeared, they would hardly notice - as a green kid, the company is investing in you - you likely add very little value, so you are being payed more than they are able to extract in value from your labor. You are likely being trained, groomed and given experience in the hopes that your value will eventually increase past the point where their investment is, making you a profitable employee to have on board. If the 20 year veteran disappeared, the lights wouldn't turn on, the database would stop working, nobody would be able to get a new release out, it would start raining blood, cats and dogs would be living together and the company would go into crisis mood. But you wouldn't know about that, because you haven't experienced it...
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
Usually because if you don't, someone else will be willing to.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
"It believe this is just one more example of what my generation is facing (19-30), the "something for nothing" problem."
Something for nothing and the downloads for free.
[The post below yours]
"It's the "all kids must go to college" culture that we have--we even direct kids away from the things they're interested in"
Yeah! Who needs a Devry or ITT education!
Funny my captcha is schools.
Bean counters disillusioned at inability to find balance between outsourcing and insourcing at the employee expense for bigger profits.
"If managers stopped "managing" people like they are a herd and became a part of their team, I don't see why they shouldn't be able to hold on to employees as long as the pay is competitive."
That's why Solectron lost it's Memphis plant. Too many team members getting promoted to manger/team lead, then managing their co-workers and not acting as part of the team, instead just sitting on their asses and looking at their computer screens all day long. Inventory goes missing, people decide to not show up to work because of the bullshit, things get lost because nobody gives a fuck anymore because they *KNOW* they're being treated as nothing more than cattle.
I'm glad I left that job before having to deal with the embarassment that cost them their contract with HP. Sadly, right after leaving the company, I got run over by a drunk driver. Now I'm not-so-hirable anymore, because I can't lift 50 pounds, nor can I run, but NO DOCTOR WILL SAY I'M DISABLED.
But that's a different story.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The best experience you'll get is thorough experience in a specific discipline which is valuable. Job hopping makes you an expert at nothing and somewhere down the line, that will bite you. Work hard in one place and it will pay off in spades.
Not disagreeing with you, but I find that people just out of school often know better programming technique, esp. with regard to object-orientation, versus more experienced programmers for whom object oriented programming is a "second language" of sorts.
You also see the same thing with physicians. The ones for whom med. school is a recent memory often have better experience with new techniques and new machines as compared to experienced doctors who have learned the new technology through a continuing education program.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
I was once a disillusioned IT worker. I oft wondered why my ability and all my raw potential weren't being properly compensated as I struggled through the first half of my career. Further clouding my vision was an early payoff in consulting where I managed to bill out more than what was probably justified when I was in my early 20s. There was a distinct lack of IT talent in the community I find myself in and got a lot of business via word of mouth.
It wasn't till later on in my career I learned some humility and became easier to work with, and that's when the bucks started to roll in. When my can-do attitude started to shed the rampant contrarian in me. I see a lot of kids younger than me that go through this - I recently tried to give some budding superstars inside and outside my company some coaching in this regard; however, they didn't become open till they lost their jobs. It seems that this is a lesson the young continue to need to learn, and my dad had hinted to me that this would be my struggle with others as he saw me grow up to be a smart alecky know it all.
So if there's one thing I can recommend to the under 25 crowd, it's this: a little humility and willingness to learn from others goes a long way. You'll find that people that don't always have all the top technical answers at their disposal are useful in other ways: managing chemistry with team members, negotiating with clients, directing personnel in certain directions and managing crisis before they get out of control.
I have to deal a lot with fresh-from-uni workers in my team recently, and most of them have wrong expectations like in TFA. But I found the reason for this: they also think they have the skill. Don't get me wrong, most of them are very smart, but once they are working on a real industry project they see that the people with big offices and salaries don't get all that for no reason.
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
You might be thinking that, because your code is small, tight and extra clever, you are the better coder. But in a corporate environment, all you are doing is leaving land mines for your fellow workers when you code like that. Nobody cares if you saved a few clock cycles on a particular inner loop if nobody can follow your design decisions, read your code or make heads or tails of your tactics because you didn't document your work or you used a coding style that was too egocentrically clever. It's really simple: Look at my code. Look at their code. Pay me more. That is very naive. You are working in a company; How much value are you adding to the company? How much value are your peers adding? Paying you more because your code is clever is something that won't happen, ever. Perhaps, if you can make a lot more quality code than others (you are faster, with easy to read and bug-free code), you should get payed more.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
We've done our young people a disservice the past few decades....in schools and society, we've taken away anything that might hurt little Timmy's self esteem.....everyone gets an award for 'trying', and everyone is taught they are all equal and will be treated that way.
Parents who work too much....have tried making up for it...by giving their kids what they want. It leads to people coming out of this sheltered environment, and being shocked that they don't walk right into a job making the $$ their parents did....not instantly being a manager...and [shudder] having to work their way up from the bottom.
I'll admit...my generation (early X) had a great deal of this too...but, not quite as bad as it seems the youth coming into the workforce now have.
I'm not saying it is all of them...but, this attitude does seem to be rising. Unless you can start your own business....you're gonna have to learn that there is the golden rule...whoever has the gold, makes the rules. If you wanna work and make it...well, you're gonna have to sacrifice and work hard for awhile, pay your dues as they used to say.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Manager Pot to new employee Kettle: You're black!
I don't expect a gas station to accept less than whats on the pump because I don't feel like paying it. I think the real issue is that more information is available to employee's now and they KNOW when they're getting screwed and the abusers don't like it.
Well get a clue Mr.Bitch because you don't want to pay more than 30g's to anyone to start. Look at payscale.com, if I can make 38g's anywhere else doing the SAME thing why would I stay with an asshole like you who is underpaying me?
If someone leaves your company for another job paying more money consistently. Your probably not paying at the market rate. How else could someone steal your employee?
I'm a young guy that jumped ship 2x in 1 year. I came out of college was offered 30gs, then another company offered me 38gs, then another (my current employer) offered me 46gs which is now at 62gs 1.5 years later.
If your worth more than you're being paid it's easy to find a higher paying job. That 30g support job is fine for a few weeks while your looking for something real. You can't complain about turnover and "young people" when your offering is bunk.
I run my life like a company, my labor is worth X. I don't care if your a nice guy and this is a great place to work if I don't get X. The value of a job is a factor of salary / enjoyment of the position. If you can't deliver X don't expect to keep any employees.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
"It may take a bit of legwork to find someone who's willing to pay for that, but they're always out there, because a lot of people are really really bad at what they do."
And yet porn still sells
All this study has proven is that, at this point in time, those coming out of college and into the workforce don't know how the workforce works and are disappointed that it isn't easy. Has this ever not been the case? The study showed that the youngest, who are more likely to have no real work experience are most prone to be inexperienced with the way the world works and as they get older they catch on. The only reason this has anything to do with genX/GenMil is because they are now at that stage.
If this has ever not been the case at any point it time it would have been at a time and in a field when and where it was more common for people to get one job and stay with it until retirement/pension. The IT industry has never worked that way. Workers have mobility and they use it. If they use it when they are new to this working for a living thing it is more likely due to inexperience rather than flawed upbringing.
If you are upset enough over compensation to leave, then leave. Don't play offer/counter offer games which will end with you ultimately leaving because you look like an opportunist. If you want to be an opportunist, just threaten to leave during a critical part of a project. You can evoke the same offer, only faster.
Behavioral economics have shown that only two groups of people behave rationally in the marketplace: Economists and psychopaths.
Not kidding either.
IT is the only field when getting older and more seasoned is a a downside. As people get older, have kids and get other commitments, the younger generation is more qualified and more desirable, more experienced and with more time to burn away at work. Thus, if you're in IT, as you get older your value diminishes rather than increasing like in other fields. A young kid with time and brain facility (as you age, your capacity to learn does decrease), and drive will be valued more than an old geezer with experience in yesterday's technologies. Yes, some people are needed to maintain old tech, but as soon as it's replaced (and pace of replacement has only increased)they're expandable, regardless of their business or general IT experience (dealing with vendors, politics, etc.). No wonder people don't want to be in IT, and more people are getting out of it. Cross train and get out of it, with no unions, no apprenticeships and no strong skill verification (certs are a freaking joke, I know cretins who paid others to take the certs for them) the "plumbers of the future" will be expandable drones. See ya!
I don't know if I still count as "Young" (almost 30). My disillusionment came from not understanding how some of the major IT companies stopped wanting to innovate, seemingly only motivated by profit and high-stacked management. Working at two fortune 500 companies in R&D software facilities and being constantly chained down by paperwork and other useless (point of view) management activities took a high toll on my energy and spirit to create/explore new technologies. I don't think the younger generation is as Naive as a lot of people take them for, especially when they thrive on new technology/information. Being forced to set up my corporate career goals yearly on what I hope to achieve, seemed fruitless and a waste of time. Time spent in the several small business offices, in the hope of trimming management cruft and wasteful activities did not pan out either.
In the end, I found the only work freedom that worked, was from starting my own company. To each their own.
Sig it.
And needing a private place to talk with subordinates would qualify as a business need for a private space.
wow, really nice to hear that we are all the same and there is absolutely no individual variation for, say, folks like some I know who thrive in an open space environments, and folks like me who are 1000% more productive in an office with a window and a closed door.
Also according to the same yardstick we could also all live chained to our desks 24/7, we'd soon learn to tune out everything else and attend to what's relevant, like somebody handing out some bread & water, or somebody else whipping us if we don't produce enough LoC during the 16 hour workday.
Just because humans can adapt to abysmal environments it doesn't mean that we should be made to.
-- the cake is a lie
The challenge I see is that no Millenial thinks they are below the 90th percentile - so all of them think they are in the first category, when a good number must be in the third category.
After just working my way into a position of earning the respect I thought I deserved, I have littel patience for the kids demanding more than they deserve.
Seriously. If we end up in a recession, there will be a huge attitude adjustment. I graduated from college in 1991, and job hunting at that point sucked, at least in the northeast. The people who had been laid off and had been in the workforce 5-10 years were dropping down to the entry level stuff. It often comes down to luck - or someone who knows what you're capable of doing putting in a good word. That's why working your ass off - in college, in a part-time job, at your first few jobs - matters so much. That manager who saw how hard you worked might be in a position to hire you at the next (better) firm he or she goes to. Or may give you a good reference. And if you can send a good person looking for a leg up in his/her direction when they're hiring later? Great. The fact is that a ton of your co-workers in IT have college degrees. And they know that you can coast through almost any school, and that whether you get an education vs. merely a degree is up to the individual student. So, yeah, you have to prove that you're not a lazy idiot, you're not going to get much individual attention, and you're going to be expected to work as hard as the other people in the office when they were at your level.
...and I got less done with my own office than at any other point in my working life. I vastly prefer the type of environments I've been in for the past several years, which are basically giant rooms with desks (not cubicles) and occasional bookshelfs. I can talk to anyone I need to by standing up, and it keeps me more focused on what I should be doing in general.
What I'm talking about isn't being opportunistic. I'm recommending adding new skills that the market wants, and ask your employer to pay you more for it. If they're not interested, no problem, move along.
Asking for a raise and/or leaving in the middle of a project is just going to breed bad feelings and burn bridges.
Also, if you're new or starting out, ask early on what merit raises are available. Are there some hoops you can jump through (certs, project completions, etc.) that can get you raises faster.
I don't know you, but every ounce of my being says you are talking out your rectal region. While it is possible to negotiate this way, your chances of success are very low. In most cases, the employer has the strongest hand.
If you land a new job, quietly leave. If you strong arm your current employer, they will look to replace you. For two reasons. First, they now know your loyalty lies with money and you are a liability. Second, you set your cost higher than they value you. They know that they can replace you for cheaper. Never assume you are the only person for the job. They can always hire a consultant (who likely is more knowledgable than you) to do the work while they search. Once a job in IT opens up, there is a line around the corner of people who want it. Last year in my area, a newspaper ad for IT will generate 200 resumes in 24 hours.
Moral of the story, be cautious when negotiating with an employer. Over paid worker bees are prime targets for layoffs. I'm not saying don't go for more money, just be aware that a company expects the value for what they pay for.
I'm seeing a lot seasond folks bashing us young guys. Although this story has some validity it's not giving both sides of the story. From a young IT professionals point of view I see all to often the older guys are the ones that expecting the "somethings for nothing". They are the ones expecting their yearly increases and unquestionable judgement. Perhaps once they were working and stiving hard but why are they still working in the same positions I am in when I am 20 years their junior? They have slowed down. They think they have already paid their dues so they will just sit back and coast till retirement. Putting in half hearted lack luster work but dont dare say anything young man because " I've been around longer than you've been born ". I'm not trying to be disrespectful but I see this alot. But It's not all bad from my perspective. In fact I feed off of it. Yes indeed they have much more experience than I have. So I ask them to share with me as much as I can possibly soak up. Yes, they may have been doing this job longer than I have been alive but I use my fresh set of eyes, perspective, and mentality to question these policies, practices and procedures that have been around for ages. No one ever questions them because "thats the way its always been done". It's my goal to not only do what I'm tasked to do but help my department as a whole run more efficiently. Obviously management and the hiring authorities thought I was qualified enough to work alongside these people. I cant bring 20 years of experience to the table but I can bring a fresh ideas, challenge questionable practices , and make the old timers actually WORK for their job because you better believe on my first day I will be fighting for that next promotion... The one the old gents dont seem to have yet... even though they had a 20 year head start.
I have worked for many years in blue collar jobs and only made the jump to white collar IT jobs in the past few years, so this is all based on my still limited experience.
/for/ them. More likely than not, these people are not worth the time and effort it takes to turn them into valuable employees. There is likely a problem in your hiring process, don't look on monster.com or careerbuilder as these places are brimming with inferior employees with a LONG list of degrees and certifications, but a SHORT list of actual accomplishments and real skills, and NO passion for the job itself. They are in it for the money. Look somewhere that technical minded people hang out, like Slashdot, or PerlMonks. This is where you find more competent employees who are passionate about what they do.
I think the problem here stems from two things:
- Cheap/crappy employers and working conditions
- Lazy/incompetent employees that are only looking for cushy salaries.
As for the former, if you hire someone on for peanuts, you got what you paid for. If someone wants more pay and they're worth it, GIVE IT TO THEM. If they're not, look for someone to replace them who is worth it. So many IT jobs are being outsourced to India, but this doesn't save money in the long run, because your entire development team is full of the guys that do crappy work for crappy pay. And your tech support can't speak English. Meaning your other employees and your customers will suffer from it, and eventually leave.
As for the latter, the majority of the people with a misplaced sense of entitlement are likely the result of helicopter parents that have always done everything
Take me, for instance. I got a crappy Software Applications degree from ITT because no one would touch me otherwise, but software development has been a dedicated hobby of mine since highschool, and I'm a better employee for it.
He said "actors".
This is why most people my age, in their late 20's early 30's are so hard to keep happy. We started off at the very beginning of a tech boom in in the mid - late 90's. We got paid fuck all for years. While sales guys got the big office the big cars the nice suits and the big bonuses at christmas time. I got 50 quid a week when I started working. Admittedly all I did was install cpu's and ram in laptops for a few months, but within 6 months the senior tech left and I immediately was thrown into a very busy job for which I was being paid shit all for. Then two years later they wonder why I get pissed off and leave. It's only in the last year that employers are starting to realise that tech's, sys admins, net admins, etc are valuable commodities. These companies charge out at $100 - $175 an hour, so you can be damn sure I want as much pay as a plumber or a welder would get out of that at a plumbing / welding company. We are very highly skilled individuals into which a lot of trust is put. We have to be sharp, on the ball, constantly thinking and most of all happy enough to be not living month to month on shitty wages. Good wages make us happy in our jobs, just like anyone else. I do not mean to put down plumbers or welders, we would be nowhere without people who do those jobs and they deserve every penny they get, what I'm saying is that so should we.
On a side note, the younger kids these days don't have to work as hard as we did back then. Back then everything was pretty new and most teachers in the education system had no idea what was going on. Since then, teachers have more IT training themselves and they can actually teach the students something.
We had to learn most of our stuff ourselves. There was no course that taught you how to install windows, fix a pc or rebuild a server. It was on the job and after hours training. It's not like that so much anymore.
Please finish your sentences. Alternatively, learn correct spelling and grammar. Either option is acceptable.
I don't know I have absolutely seen both sides of this having worked for a number of years as a database programmer and having operated my own company doing this I found when I sold my company I was absolutely stunned by the offers I recieved from companies when I went through the interview process. I cannot tell you how many times I was intervied for postions wanting 5 years plus experience knowledge in a number of diffrent areas including asking for things like CCNA MCDBA (both of which I have) wanting me availible for on call one week a month at night and 2 weekends a month and when it came down to money offering me far less then I was earning bartending in a club. It was apalling I worked my rear end off in school and in the industry to get to a point where I didn't have to work nights weekends holidays etc etc anymore and getting that kind of slap in the face was disheartening to say the least. By the same token in my current position I cannot tell you how many kids I run into that think they should have all the perks of the position and wages commensurate with years of experience while taking on none of the responsibilities that go along with it so in the end I'd say both sides are equally guilty for any issues that we are seeing now.
You start out at the bottom because thats where we weed the tools out, it's cheaper that way, quite frankly, and it's the simple Darwinism of the marketplace. Show you give a shit with some enthusiasm and work your ass off and you'll get noticed. But in the marketplace, you're a tool until your prove you aren't. The trick is, it's neither pleasant nor easy to give a shit when you don't. So find something that you'll think you'll retain some enthusiasm about. That's not easy. Find a company that is enthusiastic about itself. You'll be able to see it in the very gaits of the people working there, top to bottom. You'll know it when you see it. It's work finding a place like that, and many of us look our entire lives for it. But if you're bitter that you're not getting what you are owed right out of college, choke on it because no one cares, you've already been weeded out.
"He's using a quantum encryption scheme! That'll take hours to break!"
I was told I could do anything and get paid over the market price for my degree and that the degree did give me experience (I was required to co-op). When I graduated I learned the hard way that that just isn't true. You have to start at the bottom. I was told I didn't have to. I realized after I graduated that I had made a mistake and gone into the wrong field. I did it for security and money and realized that those were not going to be easily obtained after graduation. Oh well... back to school for me. Time to do something I really want to do.
I don't get this idea of hiring people and then not giving the an environment that the can do the job you are paying good money for.
Part of it is because a lot of managers, HR people, and furniture police don't understand what people writing code actually need. All they see are a bunch of people typing all day, and typists don't need offices, privacy, quiet, etc. They just need a desk and a computer, so that must be all that anyone who just types all day needs.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
I have a choice here whether to mod you down myself or post something and let others do it. I'm going to post.
The problem here is you.
If you work for the #2 company, that wants to be the #1 company, and they're going to compensate you the same whether the company is #1 or #2, QUIT!
Nobody has to slave for a company to make the stockholders more money. Get off your ass and get a job at the #1 company, that's probably #1 because it rewards their employees. Or start your own company.
Where are the promises that technology was supposed to reduce working hours and make our lives more pleasant?
They're here! Move to BFE Nebraska, get yourself a high speed internet connection, and work from home 20 hours a week. You'll make more than enough to cover your needs, and probably have a nifty TV and computer to boot. Glamorous? No, but not possible in 1950 either.
But even working full time, nobody is making you get up to your alarm clock at 6:30 every morning except you - because you're lazy. You have to wake up at 6:30 every morning because you want a job where somebody else guarantees you money every other friday, assigns you what to do every day, and keeps paying you as long as you don't fuck up too bad. THAT's why you get up at 6:30 in the morning.
I'd rather be a relatively poor slacker with time to myself to do what I want and to enjoy my family than a successful developer whose time is consumed with largely meaningless pursuits and whose life is filled with possessions.
You ever watching TV and they have those commercials for tech schools that teach auto repair? Sign up. Seriously. Work 9-5, make enough money to support the family and BBQ every weekend if you want to. Oh, and as a mechanic, you get paid by the job, so the better you are, the more money you get.
Nobody promised you something for nothing. The problem is that if you behave like all the other people who just want to show up for a paycheck, you'll be treated like all the other people who want to show up for a paycheck. You just get more 0's on your check for going to college.
paintball
Hmm, I wonder where they learn this from? How come the young cavemen doesn't have that mentality?
I started working as an IT professional right out of high school (I had to show my diploma to be hired because I wasn't even 18 yet). I've been an IT consultant now for about 8 years.
The first 5 of my years I worked for a small (3 techs at a time) company. There I found myself under-appreciated, underpaid and hugely taken advantage of. Right before leaving that company, a guy (my age) who just graduated college had the entitled attitude and it did nothing more than piss me off. His focus was "if I don't get a raise in X time, I am going to quit." I had to train him in all I do and I wasn't all that impressed by him nor his attitued despite being part of the same generation.
I may have resented that job, but those 5 years allowed me to gain the experience I needed to obtain the job I have now. I did my time, paid my dues and the company I work for now pays me well, I have the respect of my peers (despite the fact I am one of the young guys) and I am authority in various technologies. Nothing wrong with starting small. Count me among the believers that hard work gets you places.
That very well might be but the worst are stupid managers who don't see farther of their noses.
I agree with you - every new generation has it easier, apparently for all the wrong reasons. However, there is a huge amount of bright young people who have every right to ask more of their employers. More money, better conditions, not to be treated as children just because they only started working in last year or so. It takes forever for a young person to advance, even if he/she is more productive and better educated.
I've seen my share of this over the 25 years of my salaried working life.
My recommendation and this is dead serious, is to get out of IT by age 33 the latest. Not that it's a young person's game but because after that age they treat you like utter garbage. They want nothing better than to force you out and replace you with the next batch of freshly scrubbed young faces at half or less than what you will make then. They will stop your increases, your training until they start telling you to 'mentor' people aka train your replacement. And if you manage to survive that by being where the shit ain't, then you can look forward to a long boring tenure of ever more abstract advisory roles. And when you're chained to the machine at age 50 your economic options are a lot more limited when they just toss you out on the street.
So get out, Make the Suits happy. There is no such thing as retention. Retention is bullshit. You leave and they'll replace you, or not, with a robot or a monkey and a robot.
Exactly, if jobs are not providing the (mainly financial) incentives, then what reasons are there to stay? Employers have expectations, and employees also have expectations. IT, not unlikeable other professions also have expectation. When companies fail to provide their end of the bargain, it is only RATIONAL to expect workers to live. Young workers are singled out because they have higher mobility without being tied down by mortgage, kids, SO, etc.
30-50 years ago, if you went to college, chances are your parents were blue collar people who worked their asses off to save enough money to give you that opportunity, and you probably had to work your ass off to get more money and scholarships to make it. Yeah, there were a few kids of rich parents, but they were the minority.
Now we have a LOT more people in middle-class office jobs. They don't have to pull double-shifts to get their kids into college. And their kids don't have to work their asses off for it - they can just get financial aid and student loans, WITHOUT having to join the army for 6 years. Yeah, there are still kids out there who work their asses off to get into and through school, but they're in the minority.
30 years ago most kids who graduated college were thankful they didn't have grease under their fingernails when they came home from work like their parents did. Nowadays, more of the kids who graduate college are from families who never had to worry about anything. If your parents always had enough money, why wouldn't you?
paintball
You may have little patience for people who demand more than they are worth; but this generation has absolutely no patience for companies unwilling to engage them at market value.
It's simple economics. If a key employee thinks that he is worth $X salary, you evaluate whether or not he's worth it. If he is, you pay it. If not worth it, you don't. That's it. These people are not quitting to go work at McDonalds, they are finding other work that pays them what they want.
The 'retention' problem is not because this generation wants the kitchen sink; it's because these companies don't have any money to buy kitchens.
- DaftShadow
This is one hell of a different world than it was 50 years ago! America is not the place it was in 1958... Let's see, 1958: A college education was completely unnecessary for most well paying and secure jobs. This started someone in their career about 4-5 years ealier and saved them $30k-$40k in debt. In 1958 it only took 1 income earner in a family to provide enough to support the entire family. In 1958 most everyone could count on working for a big megacorp throughout their career and retire with a big fat pension to carry them through their golden years. Healthcare costs were a pittance compared to what they are today. Anyone could own their own home. Rents were also a pittance compared to what they are today. Anyone who thinks people under the age of 31 are too impatient are goddamned right because we don't have time to be patient, your generation has generously taken everything you could get for yourselves and left very little to us except your Medicare and Social Security debt. The company that wants to pretend it is 1958 without offering the same pensions, or unionization, without paying an employee enough to take care of the whole family on 1 income -- is being disingenuous to say the least. Talk about blaming the victims!
-- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous
He did adjust for inflation, right?
paintball
Many of my peers expect to graduate college and start off on the same level their parents are (who have worked for 30 years). I see this both in all my peers, from the construction workers to the computer scientists. I don't believe it is unique in I.T. I keep hearing that story and I don't see it. I'm sure there's arrogance amongst the youth, that's always been the case. But this is not your father's entry-level job market these days. It's a fuck and chuck employment market. Sure, there's always been disreputable companies and bosses who want to keep taking money out of the business while never putting any of it back in. But these days it seems to be the universal rule rather than the exception. Every business is operated with the maximization of wealth as the sole goal, to the detriment of all else. Slash staff to increase profit, slash benefits to increase profit, cut corners on quality to increase profit, screw the customer and ream the employee, all in the name of making the top man on the totem pole as much scratch as possible.
Now I've been downmodded by the rah-rah business crowd for expressing these views before so fuck you in advance -- the man who said "the business of America is business" should be smacked. I'm traditional when it comes to these things: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. There you go. Nobody says you're going to get what you want wrapped up with a red bow and sitting on a silver platter, but if you want it you can get in on the chase.
What's more, no organization exists in a vacuum. Business exists in an ecosystem, the same as farmers and fishermen. You abuse the ecosystem that supports you, you suffer the consequences. A prudent farmer knows when to sow his fields and when to leave them fallow. Fishermen know if they take too much, the fisheries will collapse. The same holds true for the artificial ecosystems of American industry. The leaders these days are not satisfied with sustainable profits, they want to clearcut the forest and to hell with leaving anything for the next guy.
You want to know why people feel discouraged? It's because employers demand as much labor as possible and tell their employees that they're lucky to even have jobs. Hard work is seldom rewarded. And in today's economy it's a cycle of shifting jobs and unsteady employment. There used to be a time when workers could count on a lifetime of working for a single company and a pension upon retirement. We're paying into social security now with no hope of ever seeing any of it. I'm 30 and I know I won't get any. Employers are getting out of the benefits business, cutting down on health care with pensions becoming a thing of the past. Because turnover is so rapid, it's hard to accrue any seniority in a company and the ageism curse is looking to bite us in the ass as we approach middle-age.
Real wages are dropping, the government is lying about inflation, and parents today will be the first in the history of this country who cannot collectively count on their children being better off than they. With all these problems facing us, the presidential horse race is still about foo-foo bullshit issues. The media concentrates on superficial banalities and we continue on course straight into the shoals.
So, what's there to be positive about?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
There's more to it than that. Someone just out of college may say, regarding his first 2-3 jobs, "This sucks! I'm not getting the {respect | money | office | projects} I deserve! F*** this. Bye." But that person mistakenly thinks that he's getting a worse-than-standard deal. So out of ignorance, he leaves a perfectly good job, chasing the mythical perfect job.
It's that pointless churn that I think employers might reasonably be frustrated by. (Of course, those employees might find that they can do less work and get paid more by working in marketing. In that case, the employers are themselves getting a bitter dose of reality.)
I think that's a very heathy attitude. The kids need to learn that they need to earn respect. That comes as quite a shock for some. Just as long as you're willing to grant it when DO they deserve it.
You wanna know what kind of situation will make you really depressed? How about having a 4 year degree, a CCNA, and getting paid over 50% less then the average IT person makes with just a degree and no certs? In my state, which I won't divulge just in case I make identity obvious to a co-worker, we are said to be one of the lowest paid states in the US. But wait, that's not all. About 6 months ago, a guy from a crappy local call center with no college education, certifications, or DECENT previous experience got hired for 10% more salary then I get paid. How's that for a ball buster? (Keep in mind, this is a state job so salaries are public.)
... maybe you'll get a promotion if someone decides to leave their job which they know they will never get fired from.
/endrant
We do have an incentive program for getting certifications. If I manage to pass (and pay for learning as well as the test) the MCSE and the CCNP, then I will edge out his pay by lousy grand. As for a promotion? It isn't just how long you work there or how good you are. You have to kiss butt, be personal friends with the right people and kiss their butt OUTSIDE of work, and maybe, if you're lucky
What about the turn over rate where I work? I'm betting that since I'm the only one that knows how to operate our linux servers and the only other person who is as knowledgeable as me is already working 8am to 9pm without having the time to do what I do that the turnover may become 100% since if IT can't do its job, it'll probably lead to outsourcing. There has already been brief talk of it, so I don't really want to be the cause of that and have it on my conscious. But then again, I too also have that boss that says if you don't like it, then quit. Wouldn't it be irony if I quit, and then he gets fired while the whole IT Dept gets outsourced?
Is the problem with retention due to the unreasonable demands or because these kids are getting "starter" jobs and trying to move forward into a steady, specialized career faster than the employers are comfortable with?
Let's face it, when I started off in the IT field only 10 years ago there was a stigma floating around - that same one probably still exists today. If you hang out in a low level job for too long you look stagnant, unwilling or unable to learn, and basically unintelligent. If you are not moving forward at a pretty quick pace you look like a lump, and the only way to move forward is to move to different jobs.
I'm willing to bet this retention problem is more of a reflection of smart, up and coming kids working the system to climb the corporate ladders quickly because most companies don't have policies that allow them to grow into new positions quickly enough. In other words, they are learning, getting bored, and moving on. It's not a problem with them, it's a problem with the management and their tendency to keep them under paid and under skilled if they can get away with it. That's why I hopped around to different jobs and it's probably also why some of my managers would say I was unruly.
Hmmm, must be a good job market for IT. Seriously, every time ye olde supply and demand curve swings in favor of the worker, we get this deluge of "OMG! Teh employees are asking so much!!!" stories. As someone who's seen both sides of aforementioned supply and demand curve, I don't blame kids for getting as much as possible.
Welcome to capitalism, bitches.
My wife and I are both in tech, both for fortune 500 firms. She consitantly is one of the highest performers in her group. Because we have no kids, she'll work an 80 hour week at least once a month, work from 8 to 5, come home eat supper then work 12:00 to 5:00 on a friday. She has recived two promotions in 5 years, unheard of at her company , her peers are now 10+ years older then her, she has recived a grand total of 5% in raises over 6 years which hasn't even covered the increases in healthcare costs and other benefits. when she was hired they said it's policy to start low, but you'll rise quickly, it was BS. I know bonuses aren't garunteed, but her bonuses are canceled for crazy reasons such as we underbudgeted the gas bill, so we're sacking the IT bonus budget to close it ( This is an actual example). She's actually thinking of going into one of those professionals into teaching problems as one of her coworkers did to teach math. It's only a 10% pay cut( I was amazed teachers made as much as they do and I know I'm going to take flack for saying it) and the hours are apparently much better, of course there are other trade offs. I've fared much better but I husteled like a mad man, for 8 months I worked 16 hours/day 6 days/week when i wasn't working I was sleeping. I closed a gap the yielded a 25 million dollar bonus on the contract, I got $500(yea), I eventually got a promotion to a much better paying position, yet because I am young I am still vastly under compensated compared to my peers. I know some of the bump comes from the fact my peers are pensioned while I am 401k so I have a savings requirement they don't. My current team is pretty close, so we started a revolving dinner plan to meet each others familys, after dinner at my house several co-workers asked if we had financial troubles because of our "house". I think the next smallest house I went to was twice the size. I have no debt but my house, and we have the biggest loan a bank would give us. The property tax on these peoples homes is almost as much as my mortgage. So I know this has been a long read but in closing a lot of younger workers have bee paying their dues and haven't started reaping the rewards. Your peers, people you are suppose to be interchangable with, are driving $50k cars and living in $900k homes while you can't afford half that I have a lot of friends in the same boat. We're working crazy hours trying to get ahead but never seem to be moving ahead. I posted AK to protect the innocent
1) Many of the age group mentioned were graduating college or at least old enough to start having thoughts as to their career during the .com boom. Knowing how to set an IP address in windows meant you were going to start at $50-$60k/yr if not more, a $50-$60k/yr that was worth more than the current $50-$60k/yr that you have to work to get up to, no less. They probably also new someone or in the very least knew someone who knew someone who made a ton of money in a nice cushy job during that time. Even when it wasn't the .com boom, both before and after, everyone still says "do something with computers if you want to make a lot of money". Now the people who were told that constantly and likely saw it come true at some point are expecting it to happen for them.
2) If almost everyone you interview wants more money, freedom, etc than you're offering, there's a good chance that you're not offering enough rather than the entire world expecting too much. This seems to be especially relevant in recent years (maybe I just feel that way because those are the years I grew up and fought for my entry level jobs and fought to move past my entry level jobs in). Here in the US a whole lot of people seem to feel that costs are rising a good bit quicker than their pay is.
#1 seems to be correcting itself. I've known a number of people who were going into IT related fields with dreams of big money for doing something fun who changed their minds after watching several people a few years older than them struggle to get 1/2 to 3/4 of what the world had been promising they'd receive.
#2 should also correct itself. Either employers will run out of employees and pay what is being demanded or people will decide they need to pay the bills and take the lower pay jobs, resulting in less money overall and so hopefully reduced cost of living to balance out the reduced amount of money.
Rate up!
And read Generation Me or Hello I'm Special for more info. The self-esteem movement is going to kill our country in the end, who needs accomplishment when you feel so good about yourself you don't care how good or bad you do?
It was a question put to me by an MIT tenured professor while I worked at NSF. My position being strange, neither program officer or support staff but a contractor who helped program officers with evaluation of software grants. Seeing all those PhD's around me started me thinking of going for my masters and PhD.
When I asked him for his opinion, he said "Why do you want it?". Money wise I'm making what college grads with Masters or PhD's made and he made the point that at my age, 35 that it was probably more headache than worth it..UNLESS my goal was to learn something rather than just to have the title "PhD" after my name. You don't have to have a PhD to do research, but having one will open some doors that otherwise would be harder to open (but not impossible).
The problem is that many college students see college as a way to make more MONEY first and the love of learning about something SECOND (if at all). From their perspective college is something to be endured like a bad trip to the dentist and if they can make it through it the pot of gold waits at the other end. This is wrong! College is not supposed to be a stamp on a form you get so you qualify for an expensive car, house and trophy wife.
If that is what your expectations are, then you should drop out of college NOW. You can make GOOD money, MORE money than many white collar college requirement jobs. Jobs like electrician, plumber, AC repair and believe me NOBODY looks down on the good plumber who has a BIG freaking house and expensive sports car.
Well, it is called welcome to the reality of the real working world.
I have news for you. 70 hour work weeks should not be a part of anyone's "real working world" unless they are the owner or higher level exec in charge of the business (and then that is done by their choice).
What you're advocating is throwing away almost all of your waking hours for a job - something that doesn't love you, doesn't even care about you, can be done by someone else if you leave, and on the whole, you don't get any more out of at 70 hours than you do at 40.
There is a lesson you need to learn, and that lesson is drawing reasonable boundaries. Trading your whole, active life for a paycheck is a bad deal no matter how you look at it unless you are only doing it for a couple of years so that you never have to do it again.
You work in order to obtain the money needed to live your life. You don't live in order to work.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
It took me 3 years to land a decent job with my own office (with a view to the yoga studio across the atrium) and decent pay. I think it's more a generational thing. Echo boomers have been taught about self-esteem but not hard work. So They graduate and expect one of those dot com jobs right away. They're disappointed when they have to slog through 3 years of tech support/customer service jobs before grabbing a hand up. I'm on the leading edge of the echo boomers and i can attest most of my generation want what our parents have but don't know how to get there. Conversely We had to wade through a few more years of education on average and came out to a job market where your average wage wont' allow you to start a life. The amount of cost of living inflation in the North America and lack of wage inflation means Your entry level position will buy 70% of what our parents entry level positions bought.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
The problem as I see it is the perception of what they are worth. I have a 24 year old works for me who has been the brightest everywhere he has been, so has an exaggerated self worth. He is very bright, and very good at what he does, but lacks the work ethic and experience of someone who has had to hold down a job for a while. The idea that he is very smart, and now works in a company full of very smart people, has not yet set in.
When it does he is likely to realize he is indeed a junior member of the team and be content to work his way up, if he doesn't he will likely do as the article suggests and move around until he either gains the experience he thinks he has or realizes where he is at.
As a manager I hope he stays around, he has a lot of potential and I think with a few years under his belt might be a good replacement for me when I move up, but right now both me and by boss both agree he needs a little experience and ability to prioritize on a business and a technical level.
Abysmal? Now who's not leaving room for individual variation? I work in a "pit" (I actually prefer the term bullpen) and I think it's a wonderful way to increase collaboration.
Of course I understand why you might like an office, but for the kind of projects I work on, collaboration is much more important. Don't generalize what people want based on what YOU want.
Damn, a college graduate worked hard. They deserve their own office, not to be herded into a pen with 50 other programmers. Open pens or even cubicals steal peoples souls.
And you know what, hire a personal assistant for every group of 10 programmers to go pick up dry cleaning, or get them coffee or take care of all the little things that people need done.
You really don't expect someone to put in 80 hours a week programming and still expect them to be able to do anything else right?
Give them the weekend off, every weekend.
I'm not sure this has anything to do with economics or management. I think it may be a generation gap thing. The older managers who spent 20+ years at a company and believe the company should be a major part of retirement and value these and other benefits more highly than the young don't understand the younger folks who jump every 2 years for higher salaries. At the same time the young folks aren't interested in long term retirement benefits because they don't believe they will be there when they retire.
That's exactly it though, reality.
The reality is among the IT workforce there's competition to get workers, the workers know this and so are driving wages up. Apparently it's reasonable for management to bitch about this.
Shoe on the other foot, with there being more competition for jobs and management will (and have) drive wages down a lot quicker than it usually takes for workers to realise they're worth more.
I hardly ever post replies on here but I feel uniquely able to add something to this topic of conversation. I am 22 years old and I am a partner of an I.T. consulting company I helped form. I work 12 - 13 hours a day during the week and am lucky if I can get the weekend to spend with my girlfriend. I am not a college graduate and I do not make the money my parents make (I don't expect to at my age) but I do well and I enjoy a pretty good life. Many of my friends who are finishing college now are coming to me for answers on how they can get rich quick, often times they tell me they don't mind putting the in hours until it comes time to do so. My peers just don't have the work ethic necessary to make a better life for themselves. (Shameless plug) - If you want to know more about me then Google my name "Lane Campbell" and you will find my digg profile with my company website listed.
The money is great here!
Thank you for that insightful post.
It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyways, that we've become too worried about the next quarter and to hell with the long term consequences. This will lead to collapse if we aren't careful. You can see it in the sub-prime housing crisis that's taking us into a recession. I only casually follow the financial markets, but to anyone who was paying attention it was obvious at least a year before everything blew up that it was unsustainable and that we would crash and burn hard. If we keep goings down the path we are on, without a serious correction, we will collapse as a society (not just economically). I don't think we're on a path with no turns yet but the longer we wait to change our ways the harder it will be to prevent the collapse.
*Hoping for the best but concerned that there is a chance the worse could happen.
We have four boxes with which to defend our freedom: the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.
I'm 27. And, I'm not in any traditional IT job. I work at a computer surplus. My analysis:
.com boom. The pay of the 1990s was greatly inflated. Also, the economy is simply in the crapper so it's just not possible to pay that kind of cash any more, as much as I hate to say it.
Cubes suck, many people hate them. If the business is traditional so it only has a choice of "cube" or "office" I would probably "demand" an office too. But REALLY I just don't want a drab cubicle. I've worked briefly in a cubicle (for 1 week in a temp job). It was coldly lit, the monitor was forced to 60hz so it flickered in time with the florescent lighting, it was bland and drab looking, surfaces were hard, uninviting, and very slippery so it was hard to put crap on them without it flying off the surface. I've seen old photos of what cubes were meant to look like and they did not look like this at all; a nice-looking cube, open plan, basically anything but the drab insitutional cube is REALLY what people probably want, not necessarily an office.
Pay: Yes people's idea of pay is inflated. *BEFORE* I graduated it was "normal" to make nearly $100,000/year in nearly any computer-related job. Three factors:
1) people do in fact have an inflated idea of what jobs are worth, left over from the 1990's
2) Employers have an underinflated idea of same. I think salaries have been increasing of late, but I hear all to frequently about people paying like $30,000 in places with horrendous costs of living. Here IT jobs seem to start out paying like $25,000 MAYBE, with many being the big "outsourced IT" places... the one a friend worked for paid like $10 an hour, and at that would send him 50 or 100 miles out of town with no fuel reimbursement. And then they wonder why they can't retain any competent employees.
3) On-call stuff. Some businesses seem to just expect people will come in weekends, work late, etc. And when they are off work, to still be "on call"... not just theoretically on call, but to in fact get called a lot. Well, 24*365 is 8760 hours, so being on call all the time effectively makes $40,000 $4.50 an hour.
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A seperate but related issue, I think some want to get as much salary and perks as possible as early as possible due to coprorate restructuring. Companies bit themselves in the ass by firing people off, outsourcing, then bringing the jobs back in when outsourcing became uneconomical, and expecting all to be forgiven. Sorry, but young people have caught on to this behavior, know they could be fired at any time for no reason, and therefore do not expect to be able to work at the same company for decades, racking up payscale and perks. With that view in mind it's perfectly sensible to rack up as many perks as early as possible.
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Solution? As one person already posted, they had the best luck with couches, informal atmosphere, letting people game after work, letting people use the webmail, AIM, etc when they like. Someone ought to make sure no employee is just slacking 100% of the time, but keeping things nice and informal (for aspects that don't have to be strictly formal) will help hire and retain IT people much better than some straight-laced strict borefest that has slightly better salary. The computer surplus I work at is a prime example -- pay is quite low compared to what I could make, but the atmosphere is quite casual.
these kids are nothing but a bunch of whiners. Their parents should have beat them when they threw tantrums to get what they wanted. Bunch of spoiled brats, I'd say.
Who cares if companies can't find good workers? Should we cry that companies aren't able to make more money? The worker has been crying their eyes out in America from day one. That's the way Capitalism works. It's about exploitation. Can it be that IT workers are exploiting companies by basically strong arming them? Shouldn't unions be doing this instead of the individual IT worker?
When a truck driver without a 4 year degree can make as much or more than a degreed individual then yes there will be frustration. When you go to college to get educated and they actually educate you to think for yourself and you get out of school and realize that you won't make as much as a truck driver then yes you become disillusioned. Some will stick it out because they have a very strong work ethic. Some of us will simply say fuck it and work just enough to get by and then quit as soon as we have enough money to live for 5 years without working. Lather, rinse, and repeat.
When every phone call, email, or conversation is tracked, reviewed, prioritized, and classified you start to wonder why the hell am I doing this? I can stay home and watch T.V. and not feel like a criminal. Every action in a company usually generates a ticket that has to be filled within a certain amount of time. Some people call this a productivity enhancer while others call it spying. The U.S.A. is the most productive nation on the planet yet the average worker's salary hasn't kept pace with their parents.
The younger generation is worse off then their parents and we have no hope that it will get any better. So I apologize to the older crowd for being bitter. I apologize to the companies where I've quit because I couldn't stand being imprisoned in a cubicle and filling out status reports and explaining why a ticket was open for longer than 20 minutes without me looking at it. Most of all I want to apologize to the CEO and stockholders of the corporations for failing to live up to their ideals.
Been watching Leave It To Beaver reruns again? Because you describe is la-la land in some far off time, not the US in 1958.
Well stated. But well wrong. A "Jack of All Trades" is in no way comparable to a "Master of One", in pay or in competence. Today's youth is the ADD gen, quickly shifting attention spans, with no real focus on company growth but only their next paycheck. Sacrifice is simply not in their vocabulary. Remember, a stable house is not built upon several small pebbles of varying color and weight, but rather one solid reliable and trusted corner stone. It is the latter which employers seek, and reward in great measure. Unfortunately, the ADD gen quite simply has a narrow focus on the here and now, and confuse the richness and diversity of various IT fields in Industry as an extension of college research, which work is not. Work is a means to an end, a paycheck. Your personal time is a means for discovery into other IT fields as they apply to your current company's growth. Short of that, your focus is still self centered. Time, a family, and real responsibility will soon shift your focus, and your misplaced attitude. *Shakes stick at parent*
That's usually why I have headphones and a music player: to drown out misc office noise. If people are going to bother me, they will do it if I'm in an office or a cubicle. If I want to get some real work done, I go to Hooters and camp out at a table.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
That said, not 30 days out of college I got a job for around the same base salary as my dad has as a department chair at a private university of some repute (though not as much as he actually makes). But then, I'm pretty good, considering. Others... are not always so good. Also, when I was a kid growing up the family didn't have any money, so I hardly know what to do with it. =)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
is you don't talk about Fight Club.
I'll post my story (AC for obvious reasons) as an underpaid young IT worker.
I got the largest raise (in %) of everyone in my office, yet I'm still one of the lowest paid. My boss didn't understand why I wasn't exhilarated at the rase I got (- but it's twice as large as anyone else's!, he exclaimed).
Because people got hired at different rates (based on experience), they got in at a different level. This would make sense if you think that because they bring more experience: they work better, they have more knowledge, more work ethic, etc.
Turns out I'm one of a handful that do their job well. I've become the "go to" guy because I usually have the answer at the tip of my fingers, or can suggest something in the right direction.
Even though I've been with the company the longest of anyone there; even if I continued to get many "very large" raises (6%?) I'd still not be one of the best paid for many years.
My argument is that the work you do should be compensated according to everyone else and the work they do. Your work, not this nebulous "experience[1]" concept, is what should determine your rate of pay.
So what do I do? I find another job, wish me luck!
AC
[1] Not to discount experience. If your experience measurably helps everyone do their job (or saves the day), you've justified your keep. I'm talking about "experience", aka what's on the resume. It's impossible to know from a title and some bullet points what the job actually entailed. Some guys have impressive resumes and are completely incompetent. Just because you had a great job, doesn't mean you were any good at it.
OK, so we want a high pay rate. I think that some of us are 10, maybe 100 times better than the zombies who cheated their way through Javaschool, and cannot even write a fizzbuzz program. So yes, if you want us to stay, you had better put out. What else are you going to do, hire a graduate?
I can't agree more. These managers bitch and moan because people leave, they have to hire, retrain, just long enough for the worker to find something else that pays more...and the reason is because things cost way more now than they did adjusted for inflation. In 1958 my grandfather, a non high school graduate truck driver made 7k a year, his house cost 15k. Now a days people make between 30-50k and a house in most cities is nearly 300k. Live in DC? How about 750k for something used, old, that needs work. In 1958 a nice shiney new car would cost between 20-50% of your salary. Look at what they cost today! Have our earnings kept pace? There is this old saying, nobody is going to watch out for you...you have to do it yourself. Well, no company is out there looking out for their employees these days...the worker is doing that for him/herself. Any employer wondering why their people leave needs to have a look at their compensation plan. See here is the realization. Just like said company is responsible for its bottom line? So are we!
A few months ago I finally left my first IT job, that I had since 16, and held for a bit over 10 years at a fortune 500 company.
It was after I had been at work for a solid week, handling migration issues and outage issues (unrelated, migrating datacenter A to datacenter B while big storage arrays in datacenter C just so happened to be failing). My wife had asked friends to watch our one year old so that she could keep working while our daycare was temporarily closed. These friends just so happened to be IMing me about how nice my kid was while I was also on a conference call where they were chewing me out for 'not being available.' How you get more available then living in your cube for a week...is beyond me.
Oh...and this company is actively attempting to outsource large segments of its IT to India.
Humm...why *are* young IT workers disillusioned.
END
I'm a young IT professional (early 20s), and I have to say that this is pretty much a problem on both sides of the coin.
On the side of the youth, people are coming out with relatively little knowledge and expecting too much (blame the career services personnel, the parents? All have a hand in the omgcollege=money craze). At the same time, companies often DON'T pay respectable salaries or don't offer enough benefits to their young employees to make it reasonable to stay.
Personally, I'll be finishing my BA in a few weeks and when I am done I'll have 4 years of experience as well as a the degree. Many of the people graduating with me will have nothing but the piece of paper, with no real world skill. They'll probably expect to make more money than I make, despite their lack of experience/certification/etc. It is very surprising to meet people who have taken a year of coursework in an OS and find they can't even troubleshoot basic problems. Me? I've always been a self-starter, always teaching myself. Mark Twain put it best: "I'll never let me schooling interfere with my education." In the classes where all the kids were learning VB/Java I was digging through an assembly manual. When all the kids were learning how to make network cables, I was reading books on network traffic analysis. As others have said, the people at the top of the class don't have a problem; I'm lucky enough to be one of those people. I think it is problematic that people assume what they learn is enough (extremely prevelant with people of all ages, IMO), and I don't know that I'd trust or hire someone who I know did not have the skills necessary for a job based on their experience or ability to learn not just for the duration of the BA/Masters, but continuing on in their life, as well.
For the record, I just recently got a new job where I'm making quite a bit more with a much better benefits package, and the only reason I moved jobs was because of problematic safety issues/morality at the previous job (i.e. forcing employees to be make-shift electricians and putting them into very dangerous situations with power issues). Had those things never happened, I probably would not have looked for a new job, but now I am glad that I did, because I realize that the previous job really didn't compensate workers very well (comparatively, at least).
If you are suggesting that we have less to worry about financially than we did in 1958, then you are the one who is in la-la land. Productivity is more than two times what it was just going back to the 1960's. Yet, the $1.40 minimum wage of 1967 was worth $6.93 versus $5.15 in 2005. Real Wages for the median income have remained completely flat, while the top 20% of income earners are making 115% in real wages compared to 1970. Add to this the rapidly deteriorating value of the dollar, the absolute lack of any job security and disappearance of pensions (hell, even Ford and GM are getting rid of pensions these days... New York Life is the sole remaining major insurer who still offers a pension) coupled with the threat of offshoring and soaring energy costs with almost mandatory college education in most industries and the costs in time and capital associated with post-high school education -- then add to that healthcare costs that are rising twice as fast as inflation while the healthcare benefits provided by companies have decreased by 30% since 1970... and what you have is someone in denial who suggests we are more financially secure than we were at the end of the 1950s. Please visit http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/tabfig_03.html for some helpful statistics and numbers in .pdf format.
-- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous
I don't know. I find myself in such a situation at my *new* job. The work is something I've done for a long time and can quite easily excel at. BUT what I would consider a reasonable work environment is turned into hodge podge of draconian fiat rules and ignored legitimate and sometimes legal concerns.
For instance, I punch a clock. It doesn't bother me, except the rules regarding punching in early or late. Punch in early and you're working for free. Punch in late and you're doc'ed 15 minutes. Miss a break, tough. You can't make it up. This one detail is held highest of all factors. It trumps safety (OSHA), security (CTPAT), various FDA regulations and a host of other things that should be of great concern.
I also had to find my own computer to perform the tasks expected of me. Which means I don't have a desk. I have a bench that every Tom, Dick and Harry can come along and fuck with. It took over a month just to get a badge to get in the building. I've had my hours changed six times in two months. I had an urgent medical issue I had to address. And all I got from my boss is the evil eye for coming back to work from the doctor.
I don't think it unreasonable to ask for a safe, clean place with the tools necessary to do the job, along with a little understanding that people have lives outside of work. And I don't think employers should lie just to get people in the door.
I'm really just looking for some validation that the place really does suck. And I'm not crazy for looking for employment elsewhere.
Someone hates these cans.
As an intern at Sun I have an office (yeah, it's small, but it has a door and window) and am paid what I would consider above entry level at most companies. That includes paid holidays and breaks (like the Christmas/New Years break we just had for about two weeks). Say what you will about Sun, but they treat their employees well. I would have no problem being "retained" by them.
Having not read the article like most of us, I'll say that the problem is that most youth that had it good have unrealistic expectations entering the workforce. They have an entitlement mentality. They probably heard how good it was during the dot-com boom when they were kiddies but somehow thought the good times would return by the time they entered the workforce.
Older IT workers are pretty disillusioned too. I'll bet many of them if they are still in IT are making the same or less than what they were during the dot-com boom. They know the good times aren't coming back.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Thank you for saying what is exactly needed.
I was on Helldesk for the last 8 months, and I've observed that one of the guy that I work closely with would routinely put on his headphones if he need to work on something with some concentration. Whenever this mildly-annoying guy who chats way too long comes by and finds him for something, he basically can't really get back into the groove for a couple of hours.
There were countless time where I would be testing things, or just going though some long and arduous procedures that demanded my attention, and I would be interrupted by someone with a stupid, inane question, simply because they think they're better than everyone else, and refuses to use the ticketing system. We could spend all the time we want educating users on how to submit requests, or spend time writing how-tos to minimize routine questions, only to have the same users to come back and interrupt us, with little respect of the effort we've gone through to ask them to follow procedure. But no, if a cheque is lost in the mail, you would have to go through their procedures and there's little you could do about it.
I was working in an grant-based bioinformatics research facility, in which the people could be mostly separated into administration, research/development, lab techs, and a smaller group of computer and engineer techs. I simply cannot deal with how we kept hiring researchers who can't even handle a computer. There's this PHD from Kent state at Computing Science that could barely type, and thought that we changed his password while he neglected to hunt-and-peck his password correctly. This was after I've spent a few days building his personal machine according to someone else's unsupported (and unsanctioned) Ubuntu box, and joined it properly to our systems.
You call us having unreasonable demand? Go work helldesk for a while. I was horrifyingly underpaid - especially after factoring Co-op fees into my pay equation; I dealt with the stupidest computer users who are actually doing bioinformatics research for a cancer agency; and our requests are constantly disrespected.
All of that, and probably if they ever had a budget crunch, we would've been the first to go.
I was glad to walk out of there after 8 months.
The problem I keep running onto are people demanding top level money but are providing entry level work. I have no problem paying good money for some one worth the money but few are worth what they are demanding. Pros should be self starters that make few mistakes and can deal with errors when they happen. You can't expect top pay when you take three months to do two weeks of work and your code is buggy. I wound up having to debug an employees code and I'm not a programmer. When I started out we fought hard to get to the top but so many these days expect an office and top money fresh out of school. School doesn't prepare them for a professional setting and it takes time to get up to speed. Sorry but if you are working half as fast as the next guy/girl you are worth half as much. Ah but your work is better... I never find this to be the case. People generally work fast because of experience and skill so their work tends to be cleaner and needs less revision. Unrealistic expectations is a massive problem. I've had to change how we approach projects because it's so hard to find people with skills to match their salary demands. When I started out entry level was only somewhat better than minimum wage, yes we rode to work on dinosaurs. The point is we had to prove ourselves then you could rise up at a good clip. Within ten years I was making excellent money even by today's standards. The point being I worked my way up to that level by proving myself project after project. You may be a genius but you better be able to back it up. If you're unhappy with your money and you're making 60K and the person working next to you is doing twice the work you are and they are making 80K imagine how your boss feels, he's loosing money on you. Before you quit and look for a better paying job be happy you're working and improve your skills and work ethic and you may just get what you want where you are.
And how is this different than MBA grads who watched "Secret of My Sucess" one too many times?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think Housing has to be one of the greatest differences in terms of cost. My grandparents purchased their first home for a little less than $5,000 brand new on an annual income of about $3,000 and my grandfather had only been out of school for a few years. Granted, our homes today are much better apportioned in terms of safety, insulation, amenities, appliances, utilities, and materials (especially electrical and plumbing), but for the time period in which they purchased their first house it was very modern and up-to-date. Home ownership is only a dream for most members of our generation who live in many parts of the country, whereas, it used to be taken for granted that anyone with steady employment could own their own house.
-- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous
The great one is where they refuse to let you use headphones because people complain that they don't think you're paying attention to them when they come in to ask some random question while you're trying to concentrate on getting things done. =]
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
"With more skills, especially cutting-edge, or hard to find skills, you're worth more to the company. Once you have that skillset, you can let your employer know at your next review (ask for quarterly reviews, or at least semi-annual reviews) that you've added those skillsets and feel you're more valuable to the company."
You would think that is how it works. The problem with that is, even a minimally interested programmer can increase their skills beyond an entry level salary within a year, maybe two. So the college grad with some intiative was hired at 40K can be worth 60K in 2 to 3 years... but who gets those kinds of raises? The most I've ever gotten for a raise was 7%... you just can't keep up at that rate.
The worst part about that is, probably more than any other industry, the amount of domain knowledge a person takes with them when they leave a company is worth far more than the $ they will save by hiring someone else at a lower price. You simply can't transfer all that knowledge in documentation or a week of transition training. It would behoove companies to continuously evaluate their talent and bring them up to the going rates in the industry for their value to the company, not their years of experience. Old metrics like that simply don't apply today.
From what I read, a lot of you are viewing this in a corporate context, which is fine since that's the article's approach.
/hr and they want to make $x + $20 /hr with less than 1 year of experience, no certifications (not even A+), and rarely a college degree. They have no people skills, no business skills, and usually lie/inflate their technical skills. With some of them, their first question was "how much will I make per hour" before even knowing what the job entailed. They tried to negotiate their pay before giving me their name. Talk about "privileged." I started out making about 1/5th of what they want to make. And I had to get the customers too... remember, they're being handed a customer on a silver platter.
/hr.
I want to share a different experience - mine - of the nightmare in finding junior, entry level technicians to subcontract out work to.
To put this in context, I'm a 28 year old white male with a college degree and an upper-class upbringing (maids, drivers, and private school). So if anyone knows privlege, it's me. I own and operate an in-home/small business computer repair business (like Geek Squad, FireDog, or Geeks on Call). I've been in business for 5 years as a one-man operation and for all of 2007 I tried to subcontract 3-5 entry level technicians. I ended up with 0.
The problem? They want to make more money than I do. For example, I charge $x
To better understand how upside-down the situation is, when I work with older, experienced technicians (ie people who understand how the world works) the accepted subcontracting split in this area (Northern VA) is 60/40 or 70/30 with the higher amount going to the technician doing the work. So these young guys basically ignore this system and propose their own rate which is usually more than I charge my customers.
In 2007, I met/talked with 50+ 20-something technicians, all with 1 year of experience or less, who all wanted to make $70 - $150
Unreasonable demands indeed.
Sadly, this is not the case. Indeed it's more than a little on the idealistic side of things.
In the real world, raises are obtained by switching employers. This is because as long as you are in the previous job still, the next job cannot offer less or equal to what the current one offers. Perhaps this isn't quite so in the realm of "IT" (i.e. user support), but in software development it's the rule.
Think about it. Why wait for the two-year raise cycle where you _might_ get a raise, when you can just get a better offer somewhere else and go to your boss with that? "Hey, I got this offer from somewhere else. Would you like to compete?" It's not like anyone has extra time they can waste not getting paid enough.
People who have an office can always find a conference room for collaboration (or a custom area just for collaboration, or even do it on-line these days), but people without an office can't go to a conference room to get some serious privacy to concentrate on a task they find difficult (the conference room just can't double for an office for everyone).
I've had jobs with offices and jobs without offices (essentially similar software development jobs, different companies) and all-in-all I prefer telecommuting first, private office second, and having a job of any kind third.
Irrational actors make good money too. Look at Tom Cruise.
In his biz, being an asshole actually gets you more publicity, which increases your value in some circles. Unless you want to go to hacker jail, there is no equiv in software.
Table-ized A.I.
Why don't you give programmers a generous ESOP in the company?
Slashdot = Sarcasm
I have never aged so rapidly as when I've been working for some of the more truly abusive bosses. Sadly, employment in America is "by will" and there's no meaningful support for IT employees. Talk of simply going to another job assumes (a) that any such other job will be any better - in practice, the "geographic cure" is merely a good way to waste time and money, and (b) that we're still in the Dot Com era where IT jobs outnumbered employees by an order of magnitude. We're in a recession, guys. Outside a software shop, IT is merely a support role, and support roles earn no income. They're expendable.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"Why the hell should I work 70 hour weeks, kill myself outside of a job to learn the latest tech, deal with idiot management and unreasonable schedules when the company would gladly lay me off to save $5?"
And how many employees "laid off" their employer for a fooseball table and a pay increase to go to work for a dot.com? Let's not pretend that we're suddenly all loyal and everything when in fact we'd drop our present employer in a heartbeat if something was in it for ourselves.
Well, he's dead, so I can't. I'm 29 and thanks to massive innovations in living in the middle of nowhere in the mid 1990s, I got pretty roundly treated like shit by a bunch of fuckers who did not care about anyone's self esteem.
Our principal was a real work of art. I remember he made a point my senior year of having me come into his office and informing me I wouldn't amount to shit and no college would want me. What did I do to deserve this? I got up and left a talk session about graduation in the cafeteria when the bell rang, and he was already done talking.
The football team got worse treatment after a winless season.
Yup. Being treated like shit by mean-spirited people was fucking great.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Unionize!
I have really wondered why net admins didn't want to join the Electricians union, or even the Teamsters. They would hire out of the hall, have their vacation, health, and pension assured by the union, not the company that will prolly no longer be there, get paid a decent wage, and have the advantage of union collective bargaining for wages and working conditions.
There would be no Draconian employment contracts and you would be treated with respect.
If I were doing that kind of work, I would try to organize.
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Because fuck you if you think I'm your code monkey. I remember working for a small web design business where only two guys (me and one other) knew how to code, yet we got paid less. The boss was of the opinion that sales people were the ones that deserved cash.
The other issued his notice and went into hermitage (he's one of those coders) and I promptly left and started my own business.
I remember the cocksuckers laughing at me and saying that it would be funny as fuck to see me pitching to real businessmen in their business-y suits.
They went under, and I'm still here. Turns out, when you run a business with nothing but coders, the whole business runs pretty fucking cheap. Plus, I found clients actually love having a coder pitch to them, because they get instant answers about feasibility, time and cost. Who fucking knew?
I'm not your code monkey and I don't have to kiss your ass.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
This hit the nail on the head.
Dustin - A different story...
So what you're saying is that if, say, one has a job where you have to be on the phone an hour a day, the best way to operate is to always have the receiver at your ear and ignore it till it mentions your name.
No sir, the "communication" point is just nonsense. If you want to make a point, talk about "socializing", or, since there is no money in that, use the magic "team work". This will work much better for you, as at the same time, without name calling, you portrait your introvert counterpart as unsocial or not a team worker, which only makes you look better!
Logic dictates that "concentration" workers should have offices. Communication jobs, like many of the management or HR, could use the open floor plan. The only reasons it's the opposite are status and finance. In my experience the second reason is most often a case of "penny wise, pound stupid", although one can argue that if the work is not rocket science and if you get a team of junior extrovert monkeys and it works for them on an open plan, it works for the company and it's cheaper.
From my personal experience I have to say I see the problem from a different perspective. Though keep in mind that I am not an American so my situation might be a completely different one.
See, when I tried to get my first job it was the year 2002. IT staff was fired left and right and I decided I was lucky to get a job at all just after one month.
The job was crap. They hired me because I would work for the least money (being so young) but expected me to run their complete IT including fixing a newly introduced business software that had been more like forced into the environment rather than introduced into it.
When they started expecting that not only should I be on call 24/7, do the consulting, learn to handle the whole business software, do user support and actually code some equivalents to things the software should have done in the frickin' first place in Access but also, on top of all that, I was to fix hardware problems without any money I knew it was time to go.
My next job was to be just user support and 'low level' IT work such as deploying workstations and fixing them and such. Then, during the interview, I got offered to work together with the consultant and be the one to actually build the support foundation for the new business software they were introducing. I had never worked in such an environment before, I didn't know the old software and I certainly diddn't know the new one but I thought to give it a go. After all I was offered the fall-back to the original offer of supporter.
A few weeks later they had hired another supporter and I was called into the boss' office and told that some people didn't like some stuff about how I was doing my work. I was neither told what exactly was the problem nor was I told who had complained so I could have discussed the problem with them. I was just told to do stuff differently.
Then I got the job I'm working at now. It is a good job because I like my coworkers and the stuff I do. But until this year, I was 20% underpayed (meaning you had to add another 20% to my actual salary to get to toe average salary). I was told that getting the 10% I asked for would be hard. Usually people in that company had to be happy with raises around one or two percent if they got anything at all. I was lucky since two IT people had left shortly before so they were in something of a tight spot.
But my experience thus far has been as follows: It doesn't matter whether you have managers as your boss or the owner of the company, they're all trying to screw you over and unless you are willing to risk being laughed at because you have such high demands you will NEVER get fair conditions on your job.
If companies started to actually treat us workers like we were trying to help get our company along instead of just an expense on the budget then perhaps we might start to have realistic demands in the first place. I am just unwilling to be treated as slave that has the bonus of being paid. If you think I'm unreasonable to ask that then, frankly, screw you.
It's funny how when your Leave It To Beaver vision of the 1950's is challenged, you haul out a bunch of numbers - most of which have nothing to do with your original claims. I never claimed that we have less to worry about today, only that your rosy picture of the 1950's has nothing to do with reality.
Pay dues? I look around me and all I see are contractors and contractors being let go. What company out there is letting people pay dues at?
One of the "byproducts" of more efficient communications is employees who learn quicker. Managements own strategies have backfired on them.
It's just like the old man who tells you about how in his day he had to trek through 3 feet of snow to get to school everyday. We just don't have to do that anymore, thanks to him doing that and learning to build cars for everyone. Now step aside gramps, before we stick your grumpy old ass in a home.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
What IT managers consider reasonable pay in the UK would normally be associated with manual labour. I was paid £12,000 for web design and print work, and expected to do overtime, and that was typical of the job I had. I was eventually made redundant in favour of some retard who was still using table layouts and had left the back-end for one of his websites open to the public with no password (I can disclose this now as it seems to have been, finally after over a year, fixed). The people who earn lots in web design are those with sales skills, networking skills (and I don't mean TCP/IP), generally the smarmy twats who traditionally lurked under stones in the marketing department. I've gone back to university now, studying physics and I'm very happy. I'm participating in a cubesat project and hope that will lead on to work in the space industry where (I assume) there is a little more respect for knowledge.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Couldnt agree more.
What I cannot understand is why the majority of people seek positions as employees, even though what they get is below their expectations. Why don't you try to start a business or become self-employed? It's easier than it sounds. Your initial clients can come from contacts in professional societies (if you maintain memberships) or from conferences or other social gatherings.
If you compare IT to other professions such as medicine, engineering, law, accounting, it's obvious that IT have the lowest technical barrier. A well studied high school kid can create an application that compare very well to a professional who worked for 15 years.
Why can't they ask for reasonable salary to reflect their abilities? Similar fields with low barrier are author/acting/director/art professions. A good newbie author can write a bestseller without needing to work for 15 years to accumulate experience. He can ask for the payment equivalent of a professional bestseller author.
You have to differentiate the difference between low technical barrier profession and high technical barrier profession. Paying low salary and criticizing them as disillusioned is unreasonable. They deserve high salary because they produce the output that have the same quality as someone who is experienced and work for 15 years.
This is not the first time entry-level people have thought times were tougher on them than the preceeding generation.
In the mid-1960s my father worked for a contractor on the Apollo space program. Realizing that once the moon rocket design was substantially complete, engineers would be superfluous (a Briton would say redundant), in 1968 he transfered, within his company, out of the space program to a group in another state designing time-shared mainframes for business applications. It was the best decision of his career, but one that was very controversial at the time ("you're leaving the space program?!?").
I will carry the memory of the period that followed to my grave. Some time after the transfer, the NASA cuts began, and we started getting phone calls (at home!) from my father's former coworkers, looking for work -- any work, any where, in any field. More than 20,000 engineers, scientists, and technicians in the state of Florida alone -- and probably 100,000 or more around the country -- were laid of as fast as the mimeograph machines could reproduce the pink slips. Engineers were driving taxis and bagging groceries in the towns around the Kennedy Space Center.
The ultimate was when my father returned to the dinner table from another call to announce that the caller had been his former boss's boss's boss, looking for any work -- even a drafting position (six levels down the corporate ladder, and one that did not require a college degree). Like all the other callers, he had a wife, x young children, and a mortgage to support. (Homes were essentially unsellable in the areas around the major contractors' plants; the mortgages were greater than their market value, so foreclosures were the norm.) I hope I have sufficiently expressed the desperate nature of the situation.
And yet...
No university dropped its engineering program; freshout engineering graduates appeared, just as they always had, at the end of every semester. And all of them needed jobs. Entry-level jobs. All of these people entered school at the height of the space program, only to find when they graduated that the job market was considerably more difficult than they had expected. Having a difficult entry-level job market is not a new thing.
One of the pleasures of age is that one sees the world as dynamic, rather than static. A young person sees a constant world, for it's the only one he's ever known. With age, however, one sees things change, and can evaluate, say, the first derivative of the world function. With greater age, one can see the rate of change change, and appreciate the second derivative; at that point, one can begin modeling the dynamics of social structures.
The shortage of engineers in the 1960s led to the glut of engineers in the 1970s. However, because of the 4- to 6-year delay between entering and completing engineering school, the system is not necessarily stable; the glut of the 1970s led to such an engineering shortage by the early 1980s that separate, higher, salary ladders were established at major corporations for entry-level engineers (creating salary compression that demotivated experienced engineers, but that's a different thread). The system continues to oscillate today; the point is, it's oscillating through values we've seen before.
For some types of work, online collaboration just doesn't cut the mustard. Yeah, it's convenient, but I feel it cannot redily replace live meetings.
Not when you need creativity and attention to detail.
Of course, YMMV and all that.
I do agree that sometimes people need peace and quiet to work on something; maybe there should be a few small offices labeled "private space" for workers who occasionally need them?
Ignore this signature. By order.
My question to you is why did older generations deal with it? Did they have more to gain or were they just suckers?
Of course, even that doesn't work well - see the book Peopleware, for example. Listening to music tends to harm your ability to concentrate. I like to listen to music while working, but I have also found that if I really need to concentrate, I turn it off.
This is assuming your co-worker actually listened to music, and didn't just use headphones as a social mechanism (i.e. wasn't actually listening to anything).
Anyway, all the people saying nobody needs an office should read Peopleware. They did the experiments and the math so that we don't have to.
I have brothers that work in engineering (manufacture) and mining - they have the same problem with all their younger employees. They expect more from doing less, and don't like being told what to do, when they clearly don't have the experience to work effectively otherwise.
This is a multi-industry, and seemingly world-wide (well, western I guess) problem.
_
\\/ are accustomed' - First Lensman
The great thing about 'unreasonable demands' is that employers don't have to yield to them.
If an employee makes unreasonable demands, and - here's the kicker - they actually are unreasonable, then they won't get those demands filled anywhere else either, so they won't move.
If, of course, they move to another employer who will give them what they want, then it's just the usual management bitching about uppity employees who keep whining about job satisfaction and respect. In which case, I'm over it, and these employers should just deal with it.
Offices are for people who understand that there have been numerous rigorous studies which have shown that developers with their own offices are typically significantly more productive.
You can have any theory you want about what people "need", but the truth is that, developers at least, "need" their own offices in order to be as productive as possible.
You may think offices are a "waste of space", but that space is actually cheaper, generally, than the productivity loss that lack of office space creates.
If that were true then they wouldn't be complaining.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Yeah, and pussies like you are the reason why it's persisted this long. Instead of putting your money where your mouth is and voting with your feet, you bite the pillow and take it up the arse with a smile on your face.
Coward.
mod parent up please
As a programmer, I do tune out noise in such scenarios, however, I don't agree that I am just as productive because of the constant lost track of thought.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
"Well, most people recognize that gaining experience makes you more valuable and more capable of starting your own business."
Ah yes, the old "If you don't like it then start your own business" defense.
Speaking as one who HAS run a business, let me state that getting a business started from the ground up requires a LOT more than experience in a job. People skills, for one. Something computer geeks are notorious for not having. Being able to recruit people and raise capital is a job skill in its own right. Managing the accounts and the resources and the legal needs and the various types of compliance - at least until you can use those people skills and capital to get someone else to do so is going to take a fair chunk of your time. Going out and selling your product is going to take another good chunk of it, and even with a sales staff, sooner or later the #1 person is going to get involved in the big deals.
You can do this if you have the stamina. But after all the overhead time burned up, it's more than likely that your technical skill set is going to erode as you dedicate your resources to the business. If you enjoy playing with business more than you enjoy playing with raw technology, that's fine. But not all of us do.
And as for companies going into "crisis mood" (sic), pretty much everywhere I've been since the Era of the Disposable Employee began blood rains from the ceiling on an almost daily basis. In 50 years we've gone from the idea of "Computers Don't Make Mistakes" to simply expecting our software to be perpetually broken and in constant need of rebooting, coddling, massaging or working around.
Exactamundo. Generally, publicly traded companies are the worst in tha the managers there feel completely at ease to sack you if it will save a buck or half. Hiding behind the "shareholder interest" while lining their own pockets while being incompetent, and preparing their own golden parachute, and a landing place (anothe company executive position - we know how these execs are good chums and supportive of each other) - now tell me how the hell is such a person going to appreciate your work and care for your position?
If I try really hard, I might get a little raise, but it's not guaranteed. I am only guaranteed to increase the bottom line of that elite that has no talent to speak of but to land well-paying management jobs. The raise I would get wouldn't make a real difference in my life anyway.
So I quit IT and the corporate world in general, and focus now on scientific work in academia. The salary is ridicolously low, but I enjoy it, and THAT makes the real difference in my life. Even if I had twice the pay, it wouldn't generally change how I live, but if I hated the environment, the job and the person I was making rich, that would.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
What you described is called: MANAGEMENT
What the parent to your presumptive post argued is spot on. You went and jumped the rails assuming his company is the same as yours and must therefore be a boldfaced lie.
As much as it riles me, these new graduates are actually right asking for more.
I don't know how many times I hear directors telling people that if companies want to keep them, then those 7 figure salaries are what they have to pay...
Well, most IT people are realists, and I can't think of many who wouldn't stay put for the right salary package.
But if companies aren't willing to pay, why should the employee show any loyalty? The market forces affect IT staff too. You can stay with your current job and ask for a 3 percent pay rise, or move companies and take 20%.
People like to blame the attitudes of IT staff, but really, it's the company attitudes to blame.
As for me? I'm a long time IT specialist (20yrs+) recently moved to management. Even from the other side of the table I can still see that the company's attitude is wrong.
Companies who have IT staff churn deserve the problems that go with it. That's all there is to it.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
That's because the little bastards want everything handed to them on a solid fucking gold platter. Well, welcome to the real world, you lazy little 'tards. Suck it and learn to spell instead of using text-speak!
UNIX is truth, the Console is life. Use Evolution to send e-mail and not virii.
Jeez - buy some headphones. In a lot of the world office space is expensive - as the PP says, it's for those who need to have meetings regularly or whom clients visit. Give a junior programmer an office and soon he'll be playing flash games half his day with impunity.
I do object to not paying new employees over scale though. Programming is a skills based activity, not an experience based activity. If you want to hold onto good programmers that have just been introduced to the market, you'll have to pay them more.
I don't understand why people put 'The Cake is a Lie' in their sigs.
I guess it could be one of a few reasons:
The cake wasn't a lie. It just wasn't for you.
What a bunch of hokum.
"The issue managers are facing is with retention, not hiring. That means the work environment is not living up to the employee's expectation," he says. For instance, many younger workers expect to get an office immediately or be paid at a rate higher than entry level.
I've got a couple points to add (subtract) from this.
First - and this is speaking personally - it might be easier to retain employees if you would advertise honestly for positions. I have seen so many jobs which are advertised as this-or-that developer, or such-and-such administrator, and when I finally get ahold of a human during the hiring process, I find out that - voila! - no, you'll primarily be doing tech support.
Secondly, it seems reasonable to me - entirely so - that a person interviewing for a job should be able to expect that they will be compensated for the 5 years of experience they have and which was required for the position. It is not only rude, it is insulting to offer someone an entry-level salary. It's even worse when you've got nonsense like "IT Professional" positions being advertised as requiring a bachelors' and several years' experience, and all they're offering is a couple dollars over minimum wage. This bullshit is only possible because, despite what "IT Managers" are saying, there is a serious glut of IT people out there with little to no experience, and who are unable to get any due to stringent hiring requirements.
As for managers' jobs being hard? Cry me a freakin' river. People are different and require different approachs; that's the primary job of a manager, and probably the one that matters most from the perspective of subordinates. Either you do it, or you're not a manager, and should be fired.
Twenty-three percent of respondents said retaining existing staff is the top concern, while 22% said they struggle to find new qualified candidates.
Yeah, it's going to be difficult to find qualified candidates if you're only offering entry wages with few benefits to people in their 30s....
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
In my last IT job I was given stupid deadlines and bullied so much with managers physically hitting me when I told them their dadline was stupid, that I had a breakdown. Now luckily who I work for is a company that treats its workers well, and I'm paying for this by having a very low salary (I don't have a car). Money and benefits used to be important to me, but not any more. I think everybody's priorities and what they expect from their job changes during their lives, and any workplace that doesn't respect these changes gets dumped by employees. I am now in a caring, relaxing environment where not too much is expected of me and I'm quite happy to be a "Wally". I'm not looking for other jobs that pay more because I know these jobs are more heavily "managed". I have a CS degree from on of the World top 5 universities, but I am happy to earn $40k for a looooong time in this job.
Absolutely!
It astounds me that, 50+ years after the inception of the "cubicle farm" we still have people who not only defend it as "just as good", but actually seem to think it's better for workers and company alike.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Moving on is the best possible thing a young kid can do. Any company will reward a productive employee, even if they are just out of school. If they tell you that you are just too young then they should quit.
I've seen lots of kids move up fast. They learn the system, work hard, and get ahead. The too young line / you gotta pay your dues, ranks right up there with 'It's against company policy to give you more then a 2% raise.'
Give em hell kids!
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Generation Y needs to wake up and smell the coffee.
I'm part of a two developer team in a [gasp] marketing company. Until recently, we were in an open space with all the marketing and sales guys who couldn't grasp the fact that there is nothing worse for a developer than to be interrupted during a coding binge. They'd keep interrupting us and asking for our full attention at any time, no matter how concentrated we were staring at the screen. Using headphones was always received with contempt and remarks about "excluding ourselves from the team", and even interrupted us while we were actually discussing ideas about how to develop one thing or another.
ME: "Hey listen! I think I found a solution! We could write a method which receives those arguments and ..." .. guys. I need one of you!" .. we're discussing something." ... It's not going to take long, and it's very important!" ... okay .. what's the matter?" .. but how do you create bookmarks in IE again?" ... in the menu? where it says 'bookmark'?" .. right. nice. thanks. you coming along well on the project?" ... [turning toward colleague] aehm ... Where was I?"
MARKETING GUY : "aeh
ME: "Give us a min. okay
M.G.: "Come on
ME: "[sigh]
M.G. : "You told me a few times, I know
ME: "gahh
M.G. : "ahh
ME: "we were
Not to be mistaken, those guys are actually nice and we even spend time with the rest of the team off-hours, but they just have no idea how much concentration is required while coding, and for the most part, they have no interests in computers whatsoever. It's just a fancy typing machine and organizer for them, and sometimes I suspect they think they are doing us a favour by pulling us back to the ~real world~ when we look particularly intense.
Since our boss moved us to a small cramped cabinet in which we are undisturbed, both our code and productivity increased tenfold.So, to get back on topic : each his own office is not a necessity, but at least separate the devs from the rest and throw them all together wherever there is enough room for the monitors and the computers.
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
We're expecting too much? Making unreasonable demands? Unreasonable by who's definition?
To coin phrases, we're no longer in the industrial revolution. We're in the information age. During the industrial revolution you needed good scientists and engineers. Now you need good Programmers and Administrators.
Would it have made sense 100 years ago to treat your top notch scientest like the cleaning woman? IT can make or brake a corporation. I think we should be exalted and worshipped for the gods we are
-[d]-
God this is SO right. Yesterday was the payroll transfer. When the file was sent, they had reported some entries without account numbers. This was around 1-2 pm. So, we figure out it's because of a bug in the damn ERP software and they knew how to fix it so it wouldn't happen again, but they didn't have a solution for fixing the file that was easy. So, my boss pissed and moaned to the software company and one of their developers logged into our system and created a fix program and I ran it for them at 8:30 PM which is 3 hours after I was supposed to leave. I chose to stay rather than remote it because it could have been anytime after 5 he could have it done. The boig deal was if we didn't get the file transmitted by 9 am monday, we would not get PAID. So, I thought it was ok to stay past 5. I was figuring boy it couldn't take that long....boy was I wrong. If this was the only incidence of this, I wouldn't be so disgruntled.
I was asked to give up THANKSGIVING this past year a year in advanced and a month after the date was set, my backup's wife got pregnant. 9 months in advance we knew about it, yet could get noone hired so the guy ended up giving up time with his baby to assist. Nevermind he never took the time to learn the migration process because we thought he wouldn't be there.....so I ended up being 3 days ON SITE and onloy had 4 hours sleep in those 3 days. What did I get besides overtime money? I handshake and a nice plaque. FUCK THAT. Give us a friggin raise because if it wasn't for the 2 sysadmins and 2 DBA's working on it that weekend, they wouldn't HAVE a system.
Good IT workers are being taken advantage of since the good ones usually like what they do. Well, the good ones are getting pissed off at being on friggin call 24/7. The good ones are tired of getting their dinner interrupted constantly and being asked to give up lunch to fix shit. The good ones are tired of giving up family time to fix shit. The good ones are tired of the clueless dolts in management that say yes to every friggin thing other departments want with out friggin taking 5 minutes to think if they have the staff to do it. The good ones are tired of being miracle workers without recognition with things like an office, a better salary and new tools. So the good ones leave.
Gorkman
"However, there is a huge amount of bright young people who have every right to ask more of their employers. More money, better conditions, not to be treated as children just because they only started working in last year or so. It takes forever for a young person to advance, even if he/she is more productive and better educated."
You say they have a "right" as if that were true. Please give a cogent reason.
The employer has a "right" that more productive, better educated Johnny prove they are more productive and can friggin' work, too.
In my 35 year salaried life, I've seen a large share of worthless new folks claiming they're better.
I have followed job ads in Denver for about 1.5 years. I see ads for IT workers that advertise pay less than the pay advertised for unsilled workers. And IT work is often just as dead-end.
For example, I recently came across a job for a help desk worker that requires a bachelors degree and significant professional experience. The pay is $16 dollars an hour. I also came across a part-time job for a web-developer that requires a bachelors degree, and many other other requirements, for $14 an hour. Unskilled labor often pays more.
Employers expect people to spend four years of their lives, and tens of thousands of dollars, to aspire to a dead-end job that does not even pay a living wage. Those people in construction crews who hold up a stop sign earn much more, as do Golden-Gate bus drivers, and letter carriers.
To see the results of my informal survey, go to techtoil.org, and click on "Salary Survey" check out these sections:
# TECH/HELPDESK : $10 - $20/hour
# UNSKILLED LABOR : $8 - $16/hour
# WEB DESIGN : $0 - $30/hour
Actually, my biggest problem was that the family finances were some huge secret. How much did my parents make? Dunno. mortgage? Dunno. Car payments? Big mystery.
Results of being treated as kid, instead of being trained to become an adult.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
It's a constant. Employers hate finding new people to hire, but that's part of doing business.
Honestly, I've never seen a job where the entry level positions are "Perfectly good jobs".
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Or just people who feel like having one, who are also people whom the company deems it economically viable to keep happy.
News for merdes. Shit that matters.
Ask me about my sig.
Being 25 and 2 years in IT as a Sys Integration Analyst, I can relate to this concern. This just shows that our generation values themselves and has high expectations and self esteem. We demand satisfaction, fulfillment and pursuit of happiness. Since when is that a problem? I think our behavior has brought about many positive changes for the entire workforce such as flexible schedules, more holidays, working from home, etc... Personally, I can tell you that my main complaint being a young employee is not having enough responsibility. By responsibility I don't mean work load. Knowledge of the big picture, trust and responsibility often lack from a young employee's daily routine. What this leaves us with eventually is a boring repetitive day where we feel just like a number. Looking around the older folks at work, I can tell that their generation felt(feels) the same way but just never did anything about it. Unfortunately for those generations, the ball was at the employers' court. We might lack experience in terms of years on paper, but we have passion, thirst, energy, enthusiasm. If only they knew how to put this to use. As much as I appreciate seniority, I think meritocracy has to play some role in the business.
robert
I'll call bull. If it were just being pampered and having unrealistic expectations, you (or they) would soon discover that. You have to earn a salary _somewhere_. If you had unrealistic criteria, soon you _have_ to adjust them to more realistic levels, or starve. It's that simple.
So basically when we see half a generation starving rather than working anywhere, _then_ I'll believe your point.
Until then, it seems to me that you're moaning about simple supply and demand economics. If those guys leave, surely somewhere else they found a job more to their liking. Either it's more money, or it's better quality of life, or whatever. The fact is, _somewhere_ else they got a better offer. It means that the demand is there.
The fact is, "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it." That, by the way, comes from Publilius Syrus, circa 100 BC. So it's not even something invented by the new pampered generation.
If they can get someone to pay what you consider to be a fair price for their work, the fact is, it wasn't an unrealistic expectation after all. It was exactly worth what its purchaser is willing to pay for it.
And let's get into another aspect. The golden rule, much as I've noticed it being the darling of some of the most obnoxious PHBs I've ever met, is just wishful thinking and misses the point. Some idiot unilaterally having the right to make the rules, that was 1000 years ago. Now the whole market theory says it's a negotiation. One side might have more leverage there, but at least ideally _both_ sides make the rules.
You may have the gold, but that doesn't give you the right to go to a store and say, "I want that computer for 1$. I have more money than you, so I make the rules. My rule is that everything I buy costs 1$. Now obey, you peon." Well, it doesn't work that way. You may have the money, but the other side also gets to decide what their product is worth. You might be able to negotiate a price that's good for _both_, or they might decide that your price isn't worth their product, and not deal with you at all. You don't just get to tell someone to suck it up and give you whatever you want, for whatever price you want, just because you have the money and you make the rules.
The same applies to the workforce market. You're buying someone else's work. Either you negotiate a price that both can live with, or maybe you don't deal at all. But saying that anyone gets to unilaterally make the rules because they have the money... just doesn't work that way.
And let's get into something else: even the gold alone isn't everything. Everything extra someone wants from me has its own price. If he want me to program, ok, that costs X dollars a month. If he wants overtime, that'll cost extra, one way or another, because if you ask for more work you should also pay more. It's just like trying to get two litres of milk instead of one: no, you're not getting the second one for free. Unless the job did pay twice as much as a similar 40-hours-a-week job, then the payment might not be worth the work after all. If he _also_ wants me to humour his wannabe-dictator "who has the gold makes the rules" ego-trips, well, that costs a lot extra. If he stresses me more than strictly necessary, that costs extra too. Etc.
It's give and take. Different products have different prices. If you want more from me, it costs more. Or to put it the other way around, the more undesirable you make that job, the more it will cost to keep me there.
That's another aspect that wannabe PHB's don't seem to get. They pretend that money is everything, they paid the standard entry wage, now surely their acting like arseholes shouldn't enter that equation too. Well, it does. It changes the product they're trying to buy, hence it changes the price.
I see a lot of people moving to other jobs completely because they reach the conclusion that, frankly, it's not worth it.
Again, you could lament their being pampered pansies, but the fact is that they end up doing _some_ job. So
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It's well documented that the range in end-to-end productivity within the set of employable codebeasts is a of the order of 500%. (For the sake of argument, assume that all /. readers are in this set.) Those who have this productivity edge want to personally realize some personal financial benefit from it. Clueful hiring managers are able to recognize these individuals, understand that their productivity can enhance their (the manager's) career, and will fight to hire them.
HR is your deadly enemy, and the hiring manager who burns corporate brownie points to get excellent you an excellent offer is your indispensable ally. The clueful manager may or may not be good for one (1) anomalously phat raise thereafter. The chain of higher management needs to be clueful and interested enough to later notice consequential excellent results and issue sufficient replacement brownie points that clueful managers are encouraged to continue with this awful discriminatory behavior. Sadly the clue of a chain is the product of the clue of its links, so such environments are rare.
Inside most organizations there's a lifetime limit to what one manager can do for you. Take it for granted that HR wants only to eliminate the upper 20% of any salary range. Therefore to properly execute the salary ratchet algorithm you must switch to another organization for your next major raise. It's always made me scratch my head to see this flow of excellent people through code creation organizations, but I guess it's good for the industry as a whole and the individuals.
Oh yeah, one other thing. Going the contractor route really clarifies the 70hr thing. Usually only get straight time for overtime, but hey, 100% is better than 0%. And in reality, contractors have exactly (0.00) as much actual job security as employees. Death to HR, long live the free market!
--phunctor
It was the issue of this age group while growing up during the .COM craze where every IT worker was treated like they were Gods. They had free reign and were part of the business overall decision making. When the .COM Craze ended IT workers were put back in their place. Working for the companies Cost Center... Not a Profit Center.... Meaning the job of the IT Department is to save the company money, Using IT to allow the workers to get more done, insure the companies processes are enforced and reduce errors, and issue skilled workers are not doing mindless jobs that will take them hours that a computer can do in a second. For a company of a given size and activity an IT Staff has an optimal amount, to large the costs out weight the savings, to small they are running inefficient. IT workers need to realize that, and unless they are working for a IT Related company then their department is designed to be a "Glue" Department to make sure the rest of the profit centers and cost centers work well. That being said each IT Worker is a Liability and an Asset to the company, if they are not doing their work or demanding more then what the market can bare then they are more of a Liability then an asset.
I work as a IT Consultant and I have worked with many IT personal, and I haven't yet met anyone in real life that works 70 hours a week (Ongoing there may be one week a year this happens), killing themselves to get the latest and greatest. If that is the case I think the company would lay that person off because they see the person as working too hard because they are getting to much stress at their job and they will be happier with someone who works a 40 hour week without all the stress. But from my experience from companies who said the previous person was like you 70 hour a week guy who got laid off. I usually find a very inefficient IT structure that is my job to clean up and get running smoothly so I can move to an other job in a couple of months. The 70 hour a week guy is usually going crazy to put out fires but not solve the problems, and had difficulty prioritizing what is happening and leaving management out of the loop and doesn't treat the Manager like human but as a hinderers to his life.
Keeping up with technology isn't all that hard and a lot of it can be done on the job. Learning new computer languages shouldn't be that difficult they are all very similar, unless you switch between say from C to Lisp to Prolog but that stuff is taught in Computer Science classes so you have the foundation to learn any new languages. As for modern OS We have Windows/Windows Like and Unix/Unix like. Learn Windows and Unix you are good to go for 99% of the modern IT Infrastructure. There could be more work if you need to go backwards to learning other mainframe environments but there are aspects that makes learning those easy too.
I find that most IT people are treated like people, But they are not treated like they are indespencible. No matter how good you are there are many other people out there just as good if not better then you. I see this on slashdot all the time... "I am one of the worlds best programmers...". Proof A, Proof B, Award A, Award B, Certification A, Certification B... Then some old guy who has many years of experience/or some young whippersnapper walks in and start doing things that you told your boss that it was impossible. You can be replaced, and sometimes it is better for you to get replaced so you can be in a job that better suits your needs.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
http://www.itpro.co.uk/news/154929/shells-it-outsourcing-plans-lambasted.html
Ha! This will teach those damn snot-nose punks to expect too much! Outsource, offshore, hire H1Bs, make the entire IT field low-paying, and insecure, for new IT workers. Have tech workers work 70 hours a week, all sort of odd shifts, and be on-call 24x7. Then demand a college degree, certs, and experience, and don't pay a living wage.
Then publish all sorts of bullsh!t articles about how companies not find any IT workers, and how IT workers have it too good.
Thing I'm exaggerating? See the results of my informal survey, go to techtoil.org, and click on "Salary Survey" check out these sections:
# TECH/HELPDESK : $10 - $20/hour
# UNSKILLED LABOR : $8 - $16/hour
# WEB DESIGN : $0 - $30/hour
Couldn't have said it better myself. And I'm 37, not 20!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Guess they didn't forsee corporations doing everything they could to welch on their agreements.
Job 1 - C++ development - started at about $14 an hour (not much more than I was making on the geek squad at best buy), up to about $17 an hour after 6 months. No mention of any sort of review or raise after 1 year. Shitty benefits, but it was a decent first job. After 1 year, I left the job for a java consultant position, paying about $19 an hour, with a $3 hour 'bonus' for being billable to a client. After a year on the job and only being billable to a client for 4 of those months, I left for a java development position paying $25 an hour. I hardly think $25 an hour is unreasonable expectation for the geographic area I am in.
The problem is the unrealistic expectations you get about the job from the employer. The first job was a small startup, where we were told we would get options to buy into the company, which never happened. They knew their pay wasn't competitive, and that the benefits sucked, so that was the dangling carrot. Two years later, that still hasn't happened for the friends I have that still work there. The second job I was virtually assured that I would be billable all the time, which didn't happen. I was also told promotions happened fast, raises flowed like water. The benefits package was good, 125% 401k matching up to 5% of your salary, free health care that was actually good. Then the free health care was nerfed due to rising costs. Then the 401k matching disappeared, replaced by a discretionary match at the end of the year. My supervisor acknowledged that the pay was not competitive at the lower levels of the company, and that you basically had to work there 5-6 years before you really started to outpace the market. The company nearly doubled in size, employee wise, in the year I was there, and didn't have the business to support these people, so they had to make up for it somewhere. So I left.
So, I'm in my third job in three years. What are my unreasonable expectations? That when you tell me how great a job I am doing, how complimentary everyone is of my work, etc etc that it is reflected when review time comes around. Don't sell me on joining the company and then refuse to deliver on the sales pitch. Give me a reason to be loyal to the company - if you fail to deliver on your promises, then I am for sure going to jump ship when someone else offers me more money. I am young, have a pile of student loans, a car loan. I want to be able to put away a respectable amount for retirement. I want to be able to buy a house before I'm 30. Money is going to be my primary motiviation for the time being.
>But that person mistakenly thinks that he's getting a worse-than-standard deal.
His standards are higher/different than others. Why settle for what other's consider as "typical"? Why accept what others consider to be acceptable, but you don't?
>So out of ignorance, he leaves a perfectly good job,
Its not ignorance if the person feels that way. Its the way he feels, he has full knowledge of himself.
>chasing the mythical perfect job.
Exactly what is wrong with this?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Hey in the age of "at will" employment they shouldn't be bitching! They want to pay employee's as little as possible, and when they can't pay U.S. employees peanuts they outsource to India. I don't see them bitching when they lay people off - so they shouldn't be bitching now that people will leave on a dime for better pay, benefits and working conditions. Face it there is no loyalty in business - business isn't loyal to you so why should you be loyal to them. It's business - you go in, you work your hours they pay you, you go home - period! They aren't paying us for loyalty as they don't show us any loyalty. If they don't like that situation - then they need to show US some loyalty. Like, pay fair wages, decent benefits and working conditions and quit outsourcing our jobs as soon as they see they can say $.02/hour.
The Truth is a Virus!!!
The funny think is I think if I were doing the hiring that anyone that looked too skinny would be passed over, the biggest disservice that our schools have done is Dxing half the kids with ADDS. It's amazing how many were weened from the tit to Mountain Dew in a sippy cup, then the schools add in Ritalin. Now we wonder why they are impatient!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Or people who don't have an office can use a meeting room (smaller than a conference room) when they need to talk to someone privately or need some quiet time. It's never that loud in the office anyways.
At my workplace, we have two offices - one shared by three finance people, one shared by two strategy people, and the rest of the 150 or so staff is dispersed on three floors. There are tons of meeting rooms of different sizes, and anyone can book them, so its actually a really good system.
I know, right? These damn kids rack up $100K in debt going to college then expect that there are jobs that pay a living wage and allow them to pay that debt down! Crazy!
Depends on how recent it is... If it's within the last two months, it could be that the person's a fan of Schlock Mercenary where
the Cake WAS a lie in the story arc still ongoing right at the moment... >;-)
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
more like a rant from a baby boomer about "those damn kids". Consider that our parents also worked for companies where there were often unions, where there was a pension plan, where working all your life for one company often was the case and you were often rewarded for such loyalty. Contrast that with todays market where IT is looked upon with disdain much of the time - they cost money, hard to staff, often outsourced - and the idea of working for a company for more than a few years is unheard of. Pension? Ha! If you do work for a company long enough to get decent benefits you never know when you'll be let go for a few more entry level drones that cost half as much. IT workers are disillusioned, sure. That doesn't necessarily correlate to unrealistic expectations. Also I thought I was generation X or Y or something (born in 81). Now I'm getting lumped in with the "millenials". Do not want.
I am currently as sophomore in high school working as and intern for my towns it department which only has 3 guys and their is another intern. I plan on working their for the rest of my high school career and I am always willing to learn new things and find it quiet fun. I get payed minimum wage (7.65 in Connecticut) and can't work more than 16 hours a week and usually only work 8 but it is a great opportunity and i love to do things like this.
Without knowing all the pros and cons of working there, it's hard to say if you should stay there. But it does sound pretty miserable, and you should at least strongly consider your other options.
> I have news for you. 70 hour work weeks should not be a part of anyone's
> "real working world" unless they are the owner or higher level exec in
> charge of the business (and then that is done by their choice).
>
> What you're advocating is throwing away almost all of your waking hours
> for a job - something that doesn't love you, doesn't even care about you,
> can be done by someone else if you leave, and on the whole, you don't get
> any more out of at 70 hours than you do at 40.
This should be engraved in fucking fifty-foot-high granite tablets, and every young person entering the working population should be made to sit in front of them and meditate on the meaning until it sinks in. (Zen masters with beatin' sticks to discipline them are optional, but even they will only work forty hours per week.)
Before I worked in my current job, I had roughly the same view as you. But it's not just a matter of using a catchphrase to justify a crappy office environment, I actually do enjoy it much more.
Sure if we had offices, I could just walk down the hall to ask a question or something like that, but losing the walls brings much more than just being able to stay in your seat while you talk to a coworker. It's also brings about a feeling of equality, and yes, even teamwork.
At my current job, I feel comfortable talking to ANYONE, people who are 6 or 7 levels above me in the hierarchy sit in the same kind of desk as me, everyone is totally accessible. There are no secretaries acting as door guards, there aren't even any doors to guard. People ask me my opinion on technology, projects, even strategy.
Everyone in the office feels like we're in the same boat, and we all feel like a team. That's something that has never happened to me while I had my own office. It could just be my specific company, it's the first one I've worked at with an open concept, but I can tell you I prefer it to the ones where I never even saw the CEO, let alone was able to pick his brain.
I'm not going to disagree with you at all. If I'm allowed a small addition, I'd add why that's even a good thing.
See, the whole idea behind capitalism, going all the way to Adam Smith, is that it essentially optimizes using the resources we have, to create the things we actually need. You have X million people, Y million acres of land, etc. You also have these needs that the population has. The "wealthier" nation will be the one which uses them to produce more of what its people need, and less of what they don't.
If it's more profitable to raise sheep than make wine in England, there's probably a good reason why, and you're doing all of us a service if you raise sheep. And if you raised sheep anyway, and France pays more for wool than you'd get in England, then by all means, go sell that wool in France. Then buy the wine where it's cheap and good quality with that money and sell it back in England.
Or if you want to sell your land, and there's this peasant who can only pay you 1000 pounds for it, while another one would pay 2000, then by all means sell it to the latter. Probably he has a better business plan, knows what and how to raise there that's more profitable, and in the end it's better utilization of that resource and makes us all better off. Right?
So then the same applies to the workforce. If another company can pay you more for the same work, they've probably got a better business plan and can make better use of that work. It's making us all better off if you quit your work at the one who pays less, and take the job that pays more. The same resources produces more for society, right?
That's been the theory of capitalism all along. Self-interest is what makes Adam Smith's "invisible hand" work. I mean, right?
At any rate, that's the kind of a theory that apologists of all-out cut-throat capitalism love to wave around. And it's surely used, in one way or another, when they have to justify doing something for _their_ self-interest. So then it's _weird_ to see them turn around 180 degrees and moan about these ungrateful, disloyal graduates who'll leave at the first opportunity to get a bigger wage.
You'd think they'd be _thrilled_ to see the younger generation apply the same kind of capitalism all the way. I mean, surely, if cut-throat capitalism is good for us all, then people using the same principles in their job hunt are, well, nothing short of _patriotic_, right? And if the role of the corporation is solely to produce money for the shareholders, then it's _good_ to move to a corporation which has a better plan for your work and can afford to produce more with it. It's probably producing even more value for its shareholders, then.
Well, ok, that was partially tongue-in-cheek and partially taking the piss, but still... it never ceases to amuse me when people go "capitalism is good! we only have a duty to maximize our profits!" when it excuses their own actions, but demand the exact opposite (e.g., unconditional selfless loyalty) from their employees. I wish they'd make up their mind whether they want one _or_ the other.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
An employee who has a different job at least every two years, if not more often, is suspect and has a much less chance of future employment is every company I have been with. It point to one of two things. Either the employee is "shopping the market," is only interested in the money, and will jump to another job as soon as they get an offer for more money than you've been paying. It makes an employer wonder whether the employee will actively be searching for a new job practically before they are through the on-boarding process. OR, the employee has a very deficient ability on their own to pick good employers. So you would expect that a person just coming out of school may have a job or two where they were short-timers, but beyond that should have been able to find a stable employer. You may also find some short-time jobs on other peoples resumes, which could be explained by a layoff or other abnormal event. However, someone with 10 years of experience and 8 jobs is very suspect.
The beg exception, of course, is if someone has been doing contract work...
This is offtopic, sorry. Pyite: I've been trying to find someone who doesn't find it soulcrushing to work on Wall Street. The goal is to figure out, for the sake of a friend, if the stress is related to the company, industry, or individual's competency level. If you're willing to give your opinion on it, email me at knosiowpai@farifluset.mailexpire.com?
That's also ignoring the fact that some people can't adapt as well as others. I, for one, have an extremely difficult time tuning out outside sounds. If someone near me says something my brain will immediately focus on that and I'll lose my train of thought, every time.
People are all different. Some have no problem tuning out outside noises, others can't ignore them if they can hear them (yay for music played just loud enough to drown out others, but not loud enough for them to hear!)
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
Or, people who have a business need to shut out the world every now and then and concentrate, or people who have a business need to work with expensive or confidential stuff which they don't want to trust to a filing cabinet lock, etc.
I beat this by working at home. Have done so for good periods of time from 1 to 5 days a week for some 4+ years. The workplace is too interrupt driven to meaningfully do good systems coding and design. While one DOES need group collaboration, this is not desirable for 40 hours a week.
And my home workstation ergonomically is 100% better. More space, cost less than $1000, nice chair, door, window, fresh coffee from a clean pot. No traffic congestion and stress. My work has hinted no raises, I hinted full time work at home. If someone wants to see my face, I will turn the cam on. I will get may raise from deferring work costs.
I wish more companies realized that.
You know there is such a thing as noise cancelling headphones...
We are doing R&D in a few specialized sub fields of chemicals production. Kids that have just graduated have NO skills whatsoever to do the job we are expecting them to do. As we have very few domestic competitors (and none doing R&D as much as us) experienced engineers also aren't much better than fresh graduates. The only reason we employ young chemical engineers and chemists is that they have the time and the appropriate background training to learn the job. For about six months, they are pure money sinks. For another year, whether they cost more than they contribute is a lottery, because their one-off mistakes often cost more than their past contribution. We know this and we tell them as much from get go. No body ever questions if that really is the case, they just accept that in our very specialized sub-field, they have to learn a lot before contributing anything useful.
However, after just two months or so, they expect us treat them as the best engineer ever born. For them, just having a diploma or a few months of in-house training gives them a powerful bargaining position. The real bargaining position they hold is that they are still worse than useless and will be so for many months to come. This fact somehow eludes them. So we tell them to quit if they don't like what we offer. They do. Back to square one for all parties concerned.
The professional life is a non-zero sum game. All parties can gain if employers learn the job and perform it well, or all parties can lose if they waste their time and our time and money if they quit after a few months. Of course, we could offer them better pay and better conditions every time they demand it but what will we do when they actually become proficient? Pay even more? And what about our older employees who have been and still are contributing to our company? Do we raise their wages too just because new kid thinks he is more worthy or do we just tell them to quit if they don't like being paid as much as the new money sink? This is unworkable. OTOH, new employers bargaining after they have a real bargaining position is workable. Quitting only when your employer is unwilling to give what you really worth are is workable. Employers know that, most employees know that and as a new graduate, the sooner you learn it, the better for you and your employer.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
The tech colleges of today market heavily to kids promising them the world to get them to come and take classes.
Between them flooding the market like that and the general 'what is in it for me' attitude these days this is bound to happen.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Experience matters, and I'm not just talking tech skills experience. Knowing how to contribute to the business processes, meetings, people skills, customer interface, etc. etc. aren't taught during IT studies. Most of the 20-somethings at my work don't even understand that sandals, T-shirts and jeans don't really qualify as "business casual". And with flex hours, they don't understand that coming in around noon and working until midnight isn't very productive when the majority of management and other "adult" employees tend to work around the 7-4 range. As the article states, this is indeed one difficult generation to manage, for sure!
Oh yeah, and get off my lawn! (or get out of my office, and back to your cubicle...to keep it on topic..heh)
Of course, the companies could do the smart thing and stop building cubicles. They're not that much cheaper, and an office makes a more efficient worker; not to mention in some industries (IT, programming) it's equivalent to about $5k in pay as far as the quality of programmers you can convince to work for you.
Even with really nice cubicles (8 foot padded walls, door, and about 100sqft of space inside) you still have a huge problem: Everytime someone on the floor starts yacking too loud a bunch of other people come out of the zone if they were in it.
Parent post is typical PHB hype. No matter how much you improve your skill-set, there is somebody in a developing nation ready to do the same job for 1/10th your salary. Where I work, there are two ex-software developers now working as contract operators; and the operations dept is being offshored.
PC techs won't get offshored, of course they are already working for $10/hour (http://techtoil.org/htdocs/salary_survey.html).
From what I have seen, the only way to get a job in anything IT, is to already have at least two - and usually five - years of recent, verifiable, professional experience.
The PHBs expect you to work 60 hours a week and be on call 24x7, then use your free time to increase your skills for the company. Don't fall for it.
I agree that fortresses guarded by secretaries are the opposite end of the spectrum and no good either. The English are still pretty good (or bad) at that. If you look at some of the big guys who dig deep into this like IBM or Microsoft, they end up with a small cluster of offices spanning a central meeting area. See for example:
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/171/ibmsj1701C.pdf
Or even:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html
My management works us hard...they want over 40 hours a week for our salary. However, if you bust ass, they acknowledge it. You get promoted, you get more responsibility and options, you get more pay. I joined up in 1997, during the boom. All my friends jumped ship for 'cooler' companies to work for, but I'm still here. Sure, it took 8 years to hit 6 figures, but I work from a home office. I was able to trade my boring reliable car for a fun but often broken car because I just don't need a reliable car.
I wish you guys the best. WHen I'm bitching about dealing with the Indian sysadmins or the Brazillian developers due to language barriers...articles like these remind me of how good I have it.
Careers should be like weightlifting...compare yourself to yourself...always improve. Who cares what 'everyone else' has?
Blar.
You should always ask for what you want or feel you are worth. The worst they can say is, "No", and you've already got that.
I agree. If it takes 70 hours a week for 1 guy to do his job, any job, all the time, then there are one of three things going on.
1) The guy sucks at the job and it takes him an extra 30 hours per week to fix his own mistakes. He needs training, or better tools.
2) The job should be done by two people.
3) The guy is a control freak and needs a reality check, a vacation, or a good burnout to get taught a lesson.
I really don't know of anyone personally, and I doubt anyone TRULY exists out there, who can do just as good a work at the 70th hour that they did at the 1st hour. For me, diminishing returns kicks in well before that, I start making mistakes, losing focus, operating on autopilot and not knowing what I'm doing, etc. Granted, I'm not a coder, but work is work and a technical brain is a technical brain.
Some day I WILL have my own company or work for myself. I KNOW that in order to be self employed it can, should, will, might, take more than 40 hours a week to make it go. But I also believe in working smarter, not harder. There has to be moderation in things, and you said it well. Work should be FOR us, not US for WORK.
I could go on, but that's enough.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
These sorts of articles come out all the time. No real data, pure opinion.
Actually, it's not even opinion. It's agenda driven.
Or, people who have a business need to shut out the world every now and then and concentrate, or people who have a business need to work with expensive or confidential stuff which they don't want to trust to a filing cabinet lock, etc.
Collaboration is a really nice sounding word, but ultimately collaboration, distraction, and gossip are just different products of the exact same thing.
For once now and then there should be quiet places in the workplace.There are not too many people who need t work with "expensive or confidential stuff", and those can be usually clustered and placed in one workspace(like network admins working with "expensive or confidential" servers and data). Sure there are exceptions where you really need to have an office.
Boo F***ing Hoo, we actually have to pay our IT workers a decent wage, and can't outsource them all. Tough luck, hope you lose your jobs because you don't have the
"skillset" to retain people.
Seriously, although I'm (only just) outside the age range you give, my circumstances mean that I can relate to the following; Many of my peers expect to graduate college and start off on the same level their parents are (who have worked for 30 years). Yes; and the problem is that for people entering the market nowadays, 30 years of loyalty to a company won't guarantee you s***, in fact it's incredibly unlikely that you'll get to work for the same company for that long anyway.
Companies don't give a toss about people coming into the market, or about their future. They'd like to have people who've already spent time learning the skills that are required this week, pay them peanuts, and then when those skills are no longer relevant, get someone else.
There's no point in respectfully "paying your dues"; the cynical attitude described here is no worse than that being presented towards employees by the companies themselves. Yes, it may be economic reality on their part- in which case, the employees' attitude is an equally valid response.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
What incentive does a company need to give a 22-year old CS graduate when they can just hire the next 22-year old CS graduate who is more grateful than the first guy just to have a job? Incentives come once you prove your worth. 22-year old graduates have proven their ability to not die of alcohol poisoning while in college.
IT jobs that pay more than menial labor have long *long* lists of experience requirements. And not just any experience, the kind of experience that is almost impossible to get, unless you already have it. Experience in enterprise level apps like SAP is valuable. Experience in destop technology and HTML is a joke.
But the way, I have followed job ads in the Denver area for 1.5 years. I recently came across a job for a help desk worker that requires a bachelors degree and significant professional experience. The pay is $16 dollars an hour. I also came across a part-time job for a web-developer that requires a bachelors degree, and many other other requirements, for $14 an hour. Unskilled labor often pays more.
See for yourself, go to techtoil.org, and click on "Salary Survey"
I'm sorry, you're seriously contesting that the employees have a right to simply ask for more?
Hate to break it to you, but they also have the right to quit their jobs! Horrors!
As an aside, this was not always the case - employers would include in the employment contract that the employee did not have the right to quit the job - termination was at the discretion of the employer only.
It's not particularly that organizations don't recognize that individual variation exists, but more that there are all sorts of justifiable organic reasons why its hard to do anything about it. I.e., supposing I knew for an observable fact that you personally produced 10X code more than everyone else, insofar as you were in an office, but that everyone else produced 1.2X more code if they were in a bullpen. What do you suppose would happen if I gave you the office? See where this is going? Offices are expensive. This is a business, you know.
The approach I personally prefer, and would use if I could afford in my own business, would be like this:
1. Every programmer: a laptop.
2. A small private space, to be occupied generally a good 50% of the day.
3. A shared bullpen, provisioned for laptops, agile and pair programming, where programmers would land together for the other half of the day. Bullpens are project-specific, of course.
C//
I got my new job because I was grateful for the salary and benefits that were offered to me (with no negotiation required) and the 25-year old guy who interviewed the next room down didn't get the job because he made too many demands. Funny how that works. (For the record, I'm 38, and have 9 years experience in my field).
> Your initial clients can come from contacts in professional societies (if you maintain memberships) or from conferences or other social gatherings.
I assume you mean desktop support, or maybe simple web-sites? That's fine for getting started at an occasional $10 an hour, and maybe someday you can climb to $20 an hour, but that is about as far as you will ever go.
To get anywhere in IT, you need enterprise-level experience: SAP, Java, Oracle, Solaris, Cisco, Checkpoint, etc. Your social contacts probably just run windows desktop.
My opinion, based on 28 years in IT and a lot of research, is that desktop support will usually not lead to anything more. The reason is that you will be competing with people with much stronger credentials. Even if you try to go into windows admin, you will find yourself competing against hundreds of experienced MCSE admins.
Or, did I mis-understand you?
Except IT professionals often are treated on the same level as their parents. The entry level salary for a software engineer is 48-60 grand, thats pretty close to the average household income for people their parent's age (and note thats household income; often households have more than one working adult). And considering how often employers expect newly graduated kids to perform on the same level as their more experienced employees (just look at how often people complain the CS curriculum is teaching too much theory and not enough real world experience) and try to get them to do the jobs of experienced engineers, can you really blame IT workers for having this approach?
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Every generation complains about the work ethic of succeeding generations. Oh, yeah, and the music they listen too is just noise and too damn loud.
I'm not trolling. If you have a good hiring process - one which explores the expectations of both the employee and the employer - then you'll bring in people who have an understanding of what is expected of them.
I'm no big-time manager of people. I've got 27 people reporting up to my position. The twenty-somethings are no different than anyone else; they want to learn, have some interesting project work to go along with the more mundane aspects of operations and they want to be treated with respect.
If you treat people otherwise, they won't respond well, no matter their age.
And yes, I understand that some people are just assholes, and it'll never work out with them. But that's your responsibility, as a hiring manager, to figure out in advance.
[17] Leary, T., White, C., Wood, P. R., Bhabha, W. D., and Wirth, N. Lambda calculus considered harmful. In Proceedings
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
As we move more and more into a global economy it becomes easier and easier to find talented people who will work for less. Pretty soon all the recent grads with overinflated senses of self worth are going to be at the other end of the stick, begging for any work you can get.
Yeah I'm half programmer, half sysadmin where I am. I can say without a doubt many times, I feel much more comfortable working in an open air environment where I can turn around in my chair and talk to the guy in the next desk over to get a question answered or even chat while I work. When I'm cubed up though I tend to be less productive and more inclined to "do my own thing". When I need social interaction, I have to get up, leave my desk and office/cube and find the person I want to talk to. I've also found that cube walls and doors do not stop people from coming in and bugging you all the time. If you really need time to work on something alone, it's better to have a laptop and know a corner of the building where most people won't come looking. It's one of the reasons I like being on server support staff, I can go work in the network ops center most of the time uninterrupted.
Seriously, this is a major point. I had my first job out of college two years ago... I was payed $45k with a promise of $10k more if stuck around for 6 months, and then I would get bumped up to $65k after one year. Well 9 months past, I didn't get the raise, and I hated the boring, tedious, simple job. I quit. Guess what, a year later, I am making only $50k but I am 100% self employed, don't have a single boss, and absolutely enjoy what I do (mostly writing code for audio applications and smoking weed and playing video games). Screw those idiots... I was working hard, getting payed squat, and I hated every second of it. Granted, I probably didn't contribute much in the first 4 months of my tenure in the position, what with being completely new to the office environment, but it didn't mean I couldn't still do a lot better for a job. If they wanted to keep me in that role, they would have started me at $65k or higher, and then maybe I would have thought it was worth while to jump through all their hoops. But I didn't... Maybe it's because I'm young, or maybe it's because I am extremely ambitious and know what I can accomplish. I don't need to wait for them to hand me responsibility, I can go take it on for myself. Having fun at work makes a big difference in my quality of life! If you can't provide the fun, you better compensate for that with a higher salary, otherwise I could give a rats ass about your shitty little company. And btw, my business is doing just fine...
The economy is not a zero-sum game. Several companies with apparently equal core businesses and competencies can essentially offer the same thing at different prices by including intangible, low-cost, high-margin benefits. In simpler terms. A silver ring is cheap. A diamond too. An engagement ring, however, can be worth a lot more than the sum of its aforementioned parts.
Price is determined by what the market will bear, not raw materials. Value is subjective. There are many ways to create added value that are not directly linked to your costs.
If you work for a tiny low-margin company you're going to be treated like crap. If you work for, say, google, who essentially gets millions in ad money for next to nothing, you too can live like a king.
agile and pair programming are just like open spaces, some people thrive in them, some people (me included) can't get any meaningful work done in that situation.
I wonder when people will start figuring out that programming is an art, like making music: some people thrive by composing with all their bandmates (say, guitarists starts a riff, drummer joins in, singer starts noodling, there you go, a typical bullpen/open office), others prefer a duet (say, simon & garfunkel, here is paired programming), and others prefer to write in their room with a piano or a guitar (say, sting, and here you go with a private office).
An enlightened boss would realize this, and have a flexible working arrangement where everybody could choose the environment they are more productive in: if people stopped seeing 'having an office' as a status symbol, then everybody would naturally pick what they need instead of what they think they should.
Managers should start by giving the example, as any manager should be right in the middle of the bullpen, using an office/conference room only during 1-to-1 meetings and phone calls, but guess what, 99% managers will get an office and then go on about how 'my door is always open': if your door is always open you shouldn't have an office, and leave it to somebody who will use it with the door closed to get some work done instead of losing concentration every 5 minutes because somebody is talking to somebody else about an unrelated issue to what you were thinking about.
-- the cake is a lie
I knew this was going to happen. What? My going back into IT. I've tried getting out a couple of times. Computers were my hobby.... ended up going to school for them. Ended up doing some early helpdesk work... wow... IT depts are crazy... nobody respects you. People get fired for doing a good job(ie, once big project is complete, goodbye database guys. Goodbye admin! oh whoops, the helpdesk quit too... hire the admin back!). So... after dot come crash, I spent some time in the military. Guess what happened? Although I was combat arms, my reputation for fixing computers in the barracks landed me a slot doing admin/commo work at head quarters during half of my enlistment, despite not having a secret clearance even. Then when I got out, I needed a job so I went back to IT. Awful. Worked a couple of jobs, learned enough to land a gig as an admin, but I had enough. I decided to pursue a career a music. That didn't last long! Unemployment ran out! So after a brief stint with playing around with the idea of getting into sales, back to IT. What now?
I do computer consulting for a small local IT consulting shop. I'm constantly asked to work until 7-8 pm. I'm asked to skip lunches. I'm asked to work Saturdays. I do not get sick days. I JUST got a call from my boss 30 min ago! 9 AM in the morning! He even called my wife's cell phone right after(used it when my phone died). He won't ask me to work Sunday, but he'll certainly force me to by giving me deadline for things on Friday now or Saturday afternoon. So how do I fight back? My hours are flexible. I decide that if I have to work late and miss lunches, I'll just show up oh... around 11 AM. Boss brings up my 'tardiness' and his unability to reach me at '7 am'. I mention the late hours and lack of lunch, and tell him NO WAY on the 7 AM. Same old same old. Meanwhile, I have a total douchebag who loves to work 70 hours a week under me and he wants my job. Too bad he doesn't have 1/2 the experience or knowledge I have, so I'm safe for now. Douchebag can have my job in year or so, I'll move on, but I'm sick of it. it as in IT. But I've got nowhere else to go! QQ
This is bullshit, especially when it comes to programmers who need concentration as much as collaboration (that can be handled by telephone, e-mail or messaging).
So, for programmers, a cubicle plus noise-cancelling headphones should work just as well as an office. That would be a nice perk.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
IT workers are needed everywhere. IT workers know this.
Managers have managed to keep IT salaries low due to downward pressure on wages from immigrants and offshoring, but these pressures are temporary. As developing countries develop their own IT infrastructures, the worldwide demand will continue to outgrow the worldwide supply, and this will eventually be felt at the local level.
When a worker manages a system which costs an employer oodles of dollars per day of downtime, but is paid peanuts, the worker knows that the worker is giving more value to the employer than the worker is being paid for.
It is time for an upward market adjustment. The IT workers know this. The employers are trying to avoid it, but in time the difficulty hiring and retaining good IT workers will force management to acknowledge it.
Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe someone will come up with a great technology that allows managers to get the benefits of technology without the headaches of IT workers. However, if history is any indicator, most inventions that hold that sort of promise at the beginning (SQL, the GUI, the personal computer, automatic program generators (remember The Last One?), the web, and so on) usually end up creating a requirement for more IT workers than before.
Dead on, dead on. I've had to nearly fight with my boss for decent pay. I switched shops and took a huge drop in pay/benefits for what seemed a better opportunity(pay at previous shop was already low to begin with). As in, I get to work on a variety of thing and learn new skills, and help a business grow and build a reputation for myself. He didn't want to do an employment agreement which turned into a double edged sword. Sure, no non compete, but the bad thing is I trusted him to 'eventually' put me at a decent pay. He even told me what he would slowly put me towards. Did it happen. NO! It pretty much came down to... 1)work myself into a good position where he simply needed me or the business would fail.... while 2)hoping he would see the hard work I was doing and give me a good raise.
NOPE. I finally had to all but threaten to quit. Got a couple certs on the down low(hey look at these!) and made him poop his pants! LOL. In my mind, I was ready quit. I could land another job easy. So he played ball and gave me a couple raises. So I'm technically where he said I would be, but I know it'll never get better. Time to learn new skills...and... gee... too bad he's trying to get me to work 70 hrs a week!
Deal was, he hired other guys, but they had next to no experience or actual knowledge. I don't think he understood how much I knew... and as I proved to be more reliable for issues, the more responsibilities I had. So now he's trying to work in a couple other guys, but they simply can't do what I can do, and the things they can, they take forever. So I'm safe for a bit, but people do learn... I guess it's good that I pick up on this stuff crazy fast ninja style. Boss is mad because I don't want to work weekends, work 12 hours day. What an ass.
But yeah, you're damn right. I don't want to be somebody's peon forever. I don't want to sacrifice my home life for a barely livable wage. I could open my own consulting business now but.... too bad about all that debt, or I could, LOL. I'm screwed!
This is an actual conversation I had with a manager without a programming background.
Manager: The new guy (a programmer) seems to be coming in later and later
Me: What time is he coming in at?
Manager: 10 sometimes 10:30
Me: What kind of work do you have him doing?
Manager: fixing bugs
Me: aren't you guys still in the design phase? What bugs could he have to fix?
Manager: doesn't matter. he should still be here by 9.
My point: All of this points to bad management. Not disillusioned IT workers.
...
Indeed, many managers at the company I previously worked at were rarely in their office, as they spent most of their time in meetings in conference rooms. Course that didn't stop them from taking the biggest offices for themselves while those with least seniority were double up in standard size offices interior offices (could have quite comfortably put three people in the oversized window offices).
Software Inventor
Managers should start by giving the example, as any manager should be right in the middle of the bullpen,...
/prefer/ is that this arrangement have a little more internal space, and the central area be a big laptop docking zone. We could then pull the outsiders in occasionally, for special projects and jam sessions, but they could all then retreat when needed.
That's what I do. Two other managers I know do the same thing.
We actually operate a hybrid bullpen setting. 8 "cubes" opened up in the middle and closed off on one end form the bullpen, with a table in the center. Eight cubes facing on the outside represent people that feel that they wouldn't work well in the bullpen.
Mind, I don't believe most of 'em, and think it's more of a comfort-level thing, but so it goes. We have enough volunteers for the bullpen, and this way we don't clash overly much with worker values when the workers care a lot about where they work.
What I'd
C//
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
His stats are on how so many things have gone downhill from a few decades ago...just how stupid are you?
Funny, but putting all Tom Cruise Scientology craziness aside, he is not maybe perfect actor, but he can deliver. Also, rest of the world "believes" in some super deity who can be anywhere in any time. I believe in God as spiritual leader of Universe, but it seems to me that rest of people still need some solid proof about His existence (yes, this is how I see all churches, "we have Lord at our side", "Allah is with us" weirdiness). So I think it is kinda dumb (and getting old already) to single out Cruise for be what he is.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
You can only say this because you don't know how weird Scientology is. They're at least a little more wary of executing operations like "Operation Snow White" (Google it) these days, but they still have ways of dealing with critics. Usually lawsuits, occasionally other things.
But what do I know? The paper I wrote on them is merely required reading in at least one college class...
There is currently good money in setting up ready-made virtualised appliances. The general idea is to get a popular software package and then create a software appliance containing a small operating system (a minimal GNU/Linux setup) and the software package. Only that, nothing more. Make it run over a virtual machine, and you are ready to go.
As for contacts... serious contacts run Unix-like systems.
Buddy, I don't see anywhere there saying that it's adjusted for inflation, so I'll assume it's not. And that makes those numbers illustrate quite the opposite: that lot of Americans were actually impoverished in that time.
I don't know the exact numbers for the whole almost 30 years, so let's pull a number out of the butt. Let's say the average inflation in that time was 2%. Well, my xcalc says that 1.02^30=1.81. So one dollar back then will be about 1.8$ right now. Or viceversa 1 / 1.8 = 0.55, or 1$ right now is 55% of what it was back then.
(The numbers vary quite quickly with the exact number of the average inflation there, btw. E.g., an increase of only from 2.0% to 2.5% changes the final result from 1.8 to over 2.4. And I'd expect the reality to be actually more in line with that, since, frankly, the dollar's value dropped to half in the last few years alone. But let's go with that conservative estimate for now.)
So if you're telling me that the percentage of americans which were under 30,000 back then is the same as right now, you're effectively telling me that the effective salary of that population segment dropped by 45%. (From 100% to 55%.)
Yes, you could say that now more people are in dual-income households, but that's just saying that now two people must work to earn effectively the same salary as one person back then. That's not an improvement, sorry. Needing to work twice for effectively about the same wage isn't an improvement.
Or you're telling me that back then 12% were earning more than $100,000 in 1979 money, while now 24% earn more than $55,000 in 1979 money. Well, blimey, probably the same was the case in 1979 too, if not better. If you did the equivalent and said, "how many earn more than $180,000 nowadays?" I don't know the result, but I wouldn't be that surprised if it was actually lower than 12%. I don't know of that horribly many jobs which are in _that_ bracket.
That's not "woohoo, cut-throat corporatism is making us all richer." It's a scary picture of it making a heck of a lot of people poorer.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Decent money is about half of what I was making in the software business, but the work fits me a lot better. There's no taking work home in the evening. Projects have a very short and finite duration with clear objectives and metrics for success and failure. My boss is interested in what his employees do. My boss can do and has done my job and understands my job. Finally, I get to drive around some pretty nice cars every day. (If you high tech guys are in the market for a 911 drop me a note. :)
On the down side the tools for mechanic work are much more expensive than the tools I used in software (which I didn't usually have to buy). This is also a line of work that I don't want to be doing when I'm fifty.
Peter
Downsize DC Today!
I was a career software developer before joining the military, and let me tell you: I definitely get more out of 70 hours than 40.
You were also one of those people who really bought into what the military was feeding you, weren't you? I grew up around mil and ex-mil people, and I have to tell you (and they'd agree) that that isn't healthy. In fact, doing that, you end up being the starry-eyed kid that goes off to die for his country. That's not your job - it's to make the other guy die for his.
The cynics are the ones who generally fare best in a time of war because they don't go off and take every stupid risk.
As far as not living to work, I'm a personality type that really does live to work. I can't stand being idle, and derive great personal satisfaction from producing as much as I can in any job.
I know you think that you know everything because you're almost 27 and all, but I have to tell you that you're displaying extremely foolish characteristics and opinions.
You're one of those people that facilitate companies trying to take everyone's lives in return for a paycheck and you don't seem to understand that not only is it hurting you and everyone around you, but you really *aren't* as good at hour 70 as you are at hour 40.
Keep going this way, and when you look back on your life, none of your memories are going to matter because you were always at work and never actually living. On top of that, it's a recipe for burnout by the time you're 35, and when that happens, they'll kick you to the curb and replace you with another starry-eyed kid that was just like you while you wonder what happened because you lived your life for the company.
However, I know you're not going to listen, so go ahead and throw away your entire productive life on a company that doesn't care about you.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
You call it 'earning respect', when what you really mean is 'treating them with contempt because of their age'.
After all, we're just KIDS? right?
Oh look, competitor just offered me benefits and 15% increase in pay, guess I'll go work for them, while YOU learn the true meaning of R E S P E C T.
Hmm, how much does some notion of market value matter now compared to, say, forty years ago? People didn't change employer so much. I suspect that pay forty years ago was more likely to follow bureaucratic formulae - this much for three years service, that much for a going up a 'grade' because it's your turn - rather than be related to how much you could achieve and what you'd be worth in the marketplace. If that's true we might expect a 'flattening' of pay compared to age - with better younger workers outpacing less skillful older workers more quickly, but finding that their pay doesn't keep going up just because they've got, say, 12 years experience of writing software instead of eight.
Isn't that backwards? It's companies complaining they can't keep employees -- not employees complaining they can't keep jobs. Shouldn't it be the companies that we "welcome to the real world"? Seriously: the real world is that smart people aren't going to put up low pay and being treated like crap. Sure, these are relative terms, but they're set by the job market and it sounds like they're set higher than these companies realize.
I was a manager for seven years, so this is not coming from a spoiled brat programmer. I had to hire and retain people, and I did. I think doing so was a combination of: respecting that they are more than an employee, that they have a life outside their job, paying them a competitive salary, and giving them the trust and respect to do their work well.
If a company can't do that, and the employee can find another place that will, it's not the employees fault for being spoiled. It's the company's fault for not being a satisfactory workplace.
Cheers.
Indian IT salaries have been increasing at double digit rates for several years now, while American IT salaries have been increasing at low single digit rates. This can only go on for so it is no longer cheaper to outsource then to insource. I seem to remember one article predicting this would occur at about 2010.
Software Inventor
The problem is that his stats are cherry-picked in order to fulfill the 'good old days' fantasy. Back in the 1950's families did not own multiple automobiles, medical care was not what it is today (life expectancies were shorter, diseases like polio were rampant) and houses were much smaller. While job security was better, the number of high paying jobs was much smaller and opportunities for growth were smaller because people were tied to the same employer for most of their careers. A quite high percentage of college graduates (over 50% if you were female) went into teaching in the schools.
And that of course is if you were a white anglo-saxon male. If you weren't you couldn't live in a good school district, or were paid much less for the same work.
The "proof" is that they are leaving and finding better jobs.
Note, it's the companies complaining they can't retain, not the employees complaining they can't find work.
Cheers.
I would apply that to someone moving jobs ever 6 months. I think moving every 18 months - 3 years is a GOOD thing if they can show in an interview that the move was calculated as a way of gaining better, broader experience & skills. I am more interested in an analysis of the changes along with reasons and comments from previous employers (not the latest - who may want to get rid of them)
Translation:
You're the douchebag who works until 8 PM, doesn't take lunches, and says 'YES SIR!' when being asked to work weekends, plus you make almost 1/2 my pay... and you think I'm lazy and should do the same even though I work 33% faster than you, clean up your mistakes and accomplish more actual work, and have twice the experience and education of you... and could easily walk and get another job.
Yeah ok. NEXT!
Cry me a river!
There is no shortage of qualified people out there, just a shortage of cheap labor.
I may not be a smart man, but I know what an inode is.
I dunno...I have to say "Welcome to the real world". ...
I'll admit...my generation (early X) had a great deal of this too...but, not quite as bad as it seems the youth coming into the workforce now have.
You officially sound like your father.
After all, I am strangely colored.
You talk a lot of smack, for a pussy that was too afraid to leave the Post Anonymously box unchecked.
start by treating their employees like humans instead of freaking line item expenses
What, is that not an incentive? A damn good one too, I'd say.
When I hear talk of people leaving the IT field I have to wonder, what exactly are they getting into? Are they going back to school, do they know someone or know someone who knows someone where they can get in with another company? Are they maybe taking a position that's nominally within marketing or accounting and leveraging their IT skills to work on computer systems from within those departments?
The position I'm in right now, I'm straddling between IT and a marketing department. The organization has already run in circles trying things the old way and realized it didn't work -- the old way was to have poor communication on projects with neither department understanding the other's language and thus incapable of divining their needs. I'm coming from an IT background and my job is to live amongst the marketers, learning their ways and customs, so that I might fully grok their requests and provide what they need, even if it is not literally what they asked for.
Honestly, that's the biggest growth segment I can think of for IT. Despite all the promise of computer automation making things simpler and removing redundant jobs, about the only thing I can say truthfully is that we're only seeing monkey positions disappearing. We no longer need "computer operators" who are basically janitor staff to swap tapes late at night. We no longer need HTML monkeys for $70k. (I worked for a time as an HTML monkey but it was for $20k, alas.) But what I'm seeing is that there will be programmers, there will be infrastructure people (syadmins, router guys, etc) and there will be whatever the hell you want to call my position. What I think my position will ultimately morph into is a grand poobah of the data management system. The sysadmin will handle the servers, backups, etc. He doesn't know what goes on in the black box of the dms and couldn't care less. I'll tell him what needs done with it and he'll do it, he'll be the root-access sysadmin for the whole company and I'll just be admin within the dms. Setup and configurations within the dms will be on my head. I'll end up reviewing the implementation of the system, see how well the company is making use of the features, where they have room for improvement, and will also be the compliance officer to make sure that people are doing what they're supposed to be doing.
It'll be interesting to see where this goes.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Where? As in where are you located? Average hourly rate in my podunk of the woods is $85-95/hr.
So what do you mean by $xx/hr in regards to pay? Do you mean billable hours? Can you promise a minimum base wage if your projected billable hours(for your employees) are not met? I personally cannot afford to work an essentially on call fulltime job at part time pay. If you want to pay me $40 an hour per billable hour, but I only get 10 billable hours a week, then of course I will want $70 instead. How about benefits? Sick time? Vacation? On top of that, you probably want me to sign a non compete, which would mean if I wasn't satisfied with my pay and you told me to screw off, I would be totally screwed for sure and would be forced to go back to corporate IT work.
I'm in my late 20s. MCSA, A+, & Security+. Working on CCNA. 2 yr associates. Been in IT since 1999. The last two jobs, I was lead consultant at two computer consulting companies. Total of 6+ employed years of experience in IT. Familiar with just about everything under the sun.
I would gladly take $55/hr from you if you could promise 20 billable hours a week. I don't make that now, and I know I'm underpaid... nevermind the shitty hours. Once I get my CCNA, I'm changing jobs from my current employer. Question is, is your business stable enough to provide those hours? Show me the numbers.
I don't believe you when you say 1+ year experience candidate were asking for that much. You're not telling the whole story. There's no way in hell they're qualified for it and I know TONS of people who'd work for like $25/hr(20 hr billable) with that kind of experience. We've got a guy with less than 6 months exp who makes $10/hr! You must be talking like 10 hrs a week, on call... and when hours are short, you'll give them to yourself, right? You're full of shit.
You see, that bad generalisation (employee is young and inexperienced, thus X years is a requirement to gain any respect) is always made by clueless employers. Actual fact is, in technical areas such as IT/IS, someone's worthiness is discoverable quickly if you want to discover it and not hide behind company's policies, upper level management guidelines, shareholder's mandates or the lack of understanding of a technical job/environment.
This is why I always argued that PHB isn't just a stereotype. The only way technical employees will have a fair treatment in a workplace is to have a manager with a technical background. This also prevents young bullshitters from bullshitting and making unsubstantiated noise. Technically competent manager is able to set them straight.
No a senior machinist is too busy milling custom parts on a mill or teaching someone how to use the metal lathe. They are being a machinist. Some of the guys would keep frequently used blueprints in one of the drawers in their tool chests, but that's about all the paperwork they ever would keep track of. Obviously you have never worked on a production floor. Only an fool of a business owner would take someone with decades of skill with tools and move them to a desk.
We are all just people.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Just because humans can adapt to abysmal environments it doesn't mean that we should be made to.
Made to? You are being held captive? If you find your job or workplace to be abysmal, then leave. If you need a very quite peaceful place to work happily and productively that's fine, look for that in your next job. Please don't sit around bitching impotently in the breakroom about how the boss is such a evil task master. It makes work unpleasant for everyone else. While you are looking for your new job you might start with these companies. I understand that the have really good bread and water, and they pad the desk shackles.
We are all just people.
But my experience thus far has been as follows: It doesn't matter whether you have managers as your boss or the owner of the company, they're all trying to screw you over and unless you are willing to risk being laughed at because you have such high demands you will NEVER get fair conditions on your job.
In the hopes that my commentary might add something to this point...
I've recently moved to Vancouver, and spent several months jobless trying to find something - anything - to pay the bills. I'd had a few positions, but nothing concrete.
My first job was at a company that did e-mail archiving (for SEC regulations, etc.). I was paid a 'decent' salary - essentially what I was making in Montreal before moving here. Except that the cost of living is higher out here by far. Rent plus transit was about $400/mo more than I was paying in Montreal. Still, it was a job. When I started, however, I realized what a mess the company was. The one person there capable of training me was too busy and burnt out to do so, so I spent a lot of my time asking questions that never got answered. Even once I got the idea of how to use our software, I still hadn't received access to the system to actually *do* my job. Our workflow was also preposterous: a customer would sign their contract, then fill out a web form. The form would be e-mailed to someone who would print it off and put it in a folder, and then hand it to me to put back into the computer. I kept suggesting ways in which this process could get better, until I discovered that people who had, in the past, made it better had been fired for doing so, and the system revered. Needless to say, they didn't keep me around long either.
My next position was two months later, for a software company. I got the job right when our savings ran out and my fiancée's income wasn't enough to pay the rent, so it was a godsend; still, the company seemed to have unrealistic expectations. I was hired as a survey designer, but was immediately thrown into QA, where I discovered that their software was riddled with bugs that unit testing would easily have discovered. Instead, I had to manually work through hours of testsuites, filling out complex branching surveys in minutely different ways each time, to see if they broke. After later being tasked with support, documentation writing, Access database scripting, and the like, I was told that I should write a testsuite for their new software.I should write it in C# or VB.NET, however, because they're 'better for web services stuff' than Python, the language in which I'm strongest. Being told to write something in a language that they know I don't know, rather than a language with which I'm very familiar, told me that these people don't know how to run a tech company. Watching them struggle with basic concepts, progressing forward only because of the things that Tomcat and Netbeans will do for you automatically, confirmed it for me.
Our christmas party was scheduled in October, and we and our spouses were going to the Shark Club, an apparently fancy place downtown. Then, management told us we were going, but our spouses weren't invited. Then they said we weren't going at all, but we could 'plan something on our own' (us being the office serfs). Beer and pizza was suggested. Merry effing christmas. So ok, we started to arrange for beer and pizza. Then my boss asked where we were getting the pizza from, and was told 'Panago'. Their prices are similar to Domino's or Pizza Hut take-out, but we were told that Panago was 'too expensive', and we should try [shittiest pizza place in the neighborhood] instead. After seeing that our 'Christmas Party' was going to cost less per-person than we normally spent on lunch on any given day, I knew that management had little respect for their employees.
I was offered a position at a new company, as a junior sysadmin, making a 'high forties' salary. I was, at that point, already making 'low forties', and I told the company that the small difference in salary
As a 24 year old who works for an IT Outsourcing company I am here to tell you that it's not simply the "millennials" are demanding too much, the companies out there who I have worked for are proving with out a doubt that there is no real future in those companies as an actual IT worker. This is disconcerting because most of these companies expect you to give your life away for the benefit of the owners, upper management, and their customers. Moral is destroyed when promises made by employers are seldom kept and the expectations to advance in ones career are unclear. What really gets my goat is how glamorous the IT industry is made out to be. When I tell others what I do they tell me how great it is and how rewarding it must be. Waking up in the middle of the night because a server goes down, a VIP is getting an unusual pop-up, and sacrificing having any sort of relationship are not ideal ways to live. Back to the point I was getting at, there is no clear cut way to move up in the IT industry other then lucking out or job hopping as many others have suggested. Sadly, when going from job to job many are finding that they are all the same and the jobs of importance are already clogged up by the seasoned vets who are more interested in deescalating work then actually helping teach the new generation. I have two associate degrees, both in Network related technologies and I know now that these are pretty much useless. I am going back to school, most likely for a business administration degree so I can be the one getting all the benefits, doing half the work by coming in late and leaving early every day, and telling others how they are fucking up.
Silly goose, STARS are paid disproportionately. Look at the strikes that are underway or about to happen in film; the rest of the workers are paid SHIT. Sure you can come up with individual examples of actors making millions. But for every one of them, there are perhaps hundreds of underpaid, hard-working, highly trained professionals... who are about to go on strike.
Some could call it a baby problem, as in 'oh poor baby, you don't like the real working world?', but I think it's just an emperor has no clothes situation. There's a lot of hype about how great, cutting edge, fast-paced, cool, and HIGH PAYING modern IT can be. And it has failed to live up to that image in general (again there are exceptions). If you sell an image of your field as being one way, and it isn't, then be prepared for discontent.
Obviously as younger employees move around and realize most jobs out there just aren't that glamorous, expectations are lowered. But it might be nice to see employers a) stop lying in the interview process about how modern, forward thinking, etc they are when they're not, and b) see some more flexibility in the workplace. It's come a looooong way though.
In every dimension by every measure, the U.S. standard of living is much higher today than in the 1950 (for all classes):
1 Home size:
According to the National Association of Home Builders, the average home size in the United States was 2,330 square feet in 2004, up from 1,400 square feet in 1970.
2 Home ownership:
Today 66.8 percent
1940s, we were a nation of renters -- just 45 percent of Americans owned their homes/
3 GDP per Capita (inflation adjusted):
Today it's more than $42,000
Adjusted for Inflation, U.S. Per Capita GDP Has Doubled Since 1970
4 Household income (adjusted for inflation) growth 1967 - 2003
The rich are getting richer faster than the poor are getting richer!
Percentage growth in real household income from 1967 to 2003:
20th percentile 28.4%
Median (50th) $29.9%
80th percentile 62.6%
95th percentile 73.8%
5 Educational Attainment:
percentage of 25-29 year olds completing high school was roughly 50% in 1950 versus nearly 90% today. The percentage of persons with a Bachelor's degree or higher increased from roughly 5% in 1950, to today's high of 27.2%
6 Race and Gender Equality
By every measure, much better now than in the 1950s.
7 Energy
Energy costs consume 2-3% of GDP today vs. almost 30% 30 years ago.
8 Health
Health expenditures as a percentage of GDP are up 3.9 percent since 1987.
Average Annual Growth Rates in Total Health Expenditures Per Capita is 3.6% since 1980.
9 Life expectancy:
72.03 in 1951. 80.8 in 2004.
10 Retirement:
Percentage of males working after age 65:
Today it's 24%. In 1958 it was 69%.
We retire earlier and live longer!
Most data is from Wikipedia. Others are easily googlable.
way to put things in my mouth: FYI in my current job I have a fairly private two-person office (with cubicle walls between us) with a nice big window and peace & quiet, however it has not always been this way, and also when the vast vast majority of companies are into cubicle farms or open space concepts (heck, even google does that, so much about rewarding employees by putting them in the best possible surroundings so they can be the most productive) people might not have any choice, and have to decide between paying the mortgage or waiting for a job where developers get offices.
-- the cake is a lie
I've found the primary benefit of cubicles among programmers to be the rapid facilitation of koosh ball and nerf wars between cubes.
... oh, I don't know... focus on doing their JOBS, the privacy of an office is the best thing. When collaboration is necessary, the door opens.
For those people who
I have an office, and I have experimentally confirmed that the door does open, and I can go to a different location when collaboration is necessary, even a lab environment. When I need privacy and concentration, I have experimentally confirmed that the door closes and people leave me alone. Best of all, when I need a 30 second mental break, I can look out the window and watch birds for a bit. Its a useful eyeball reboot.
His name was Robert Paulsen.
Go do a realistic assessment of your value to an employer. Maybe find someone who's been in your industry for a while and ask them personally to tell you what they think after they've reviewed your skills and experience.
Then go find a company that needs what you have to offer and convince them to hire you.
Then put in your 2 weeks notice at your current company, cause that's the most you're gonna want to keep working there once you find a decent company to work for.
Also remember that small companies will usually pay a little less and have less job security, while big companies will almost all turn out to be full of stupid bureacratic rules and fiefdoms. Let your personal risk aversion and sufferance of crap be your guide as to which kind of company you want to work for.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
I am glad there is someone else out there that feels the same way I do. With the way the IT job market is I don't expect to retire by working for a single company.
i once worked in a place where the (unofficial but self-evident) criteria for hiring tech support staff was how little money they were prepared to accept. neither knowledge, experience, or aptitude were considered important.
so, of course, most of the hires were completely clueless.
occasionally, though, we'd get lucky and get someone with talent who just didn't have much, or any, experience so had to accept a low paying job.
the inevitable result was that anyone who was any good or had the potential to become good (or even the ability to pick up enough knowledge to bullshit their way into looking as if they were good) stuck around for 3-6 months until they got enough experience to be able to apply for similar positions paying the industry-standard entry-level rate (typically, about 1.5x to twice as much as what we paid them).
leaving us with the complete deadwood who weren't even capable of learning enough to bullshit their way into a better job, who held on desperately to their jobs because they knew they couldn't get or keep another one. it was like a sheltered workshop for technical support retards.
the CS manager (who was far from bright himself) just could not be made to understand that the constant retraining and cleaning up newbie messes etc cost us a lot more than just paying people a decent wage to start with.
When I took my first (and only) IT job before I went to graduate school, I accepted the starting pay of $7.00/hour and shared an office with 3 other people. I knew that other IT people in the city would generally make more than $15-20/hour to start (I had spoken to some of them), but I was an undergrad and enjoyed the more flexible schedule, even if the work was hell (the IT manager was an idiot and complicated most of the normal IT issues, among other things). I think the problem is that local IT professionals are generally all expected to do the same jobs. The older, entrenched crowd of IT probably make much more than starting salary. To a younger IT that's just joining the department, making significantly less for doing the some job may seem like a bad deal. I would also like to theorize that IT people spend a lot of time on the internet and may have a good feel for how much other IT people make. People who do the hiring may not have as thorough an understanding, and as such may offer too much or too little money as the starting wage. I think others on Slashdot will agree with me when I say that IT people are generally well-informed.
I knew a guy from HP... this is what they did for him and his whole group.
"If you plant ice, you're gonna harvest wind."
You know there is such a thing as noise cancelling headphones...
As I write this, I am in fact wearing a decent pair of noise-cancelling headphones. And guess what? They don't cancel 100% of the noise. To drown out the TV my other half is watching at the other end of the room, I have music on. But I don't like to listen to music at work, as I find it distracting. Quiet is better for me.
I went through a phase of buying the hype about open plan offices improving communication. I'm still convinced there is a genuine benefit there. But the more I work in that sort of environment, the more I find the distractions outweigh that benefit. Most of the incidental communication could be achieved just as well by inviting all relevant people to comment on relevant documents or on-line discussions when it's convenient, or mentioning a new subject of interest by the water cooler to see if anyone else is familiar with it already.
On the other hand, a trivial distraction that disrupts the concentration can take several minutes to get over, which is pretty much a killer for productivity. Worst of all, it hits your best developers disproportionately, because your best people may be literally an order of magnitude more productive than your average. A few average guys interrupting one of your best a handful of times on one day, while apparently taking only a few minutes out of a day, could easily waste the equivalent of a week of average developer time. And all because no-one gave the smart guy a door to close.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Personally, the noise grates against my soul. You can keep your offices and collaborative "pits". I would be happiest working in a broom closet if it meant I could attend to my tasks without distractions.
I've worked hard to try and tune out noise (not too successfully) but it is the "easy access" to my desk that is another major issue with me. Nothing can derail a train of thought faster than somebody hovering over my desk wanting to know how "xyz" feature works when they could have just as easily looked it up in our documentation or contact our training team.
Most of the developers collaborate during scheduled meetings. Other times we just work on our assignments. Other departments waltz over when the mood strikes (we have one large floor of an office building so geography is no bar).
-- Posted from my parent's basement
Overuse of headphones will permanently damage you.
I should not have to permanently damage myself to work a desk job.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
In one place I got complaints because I would ignore people
that weren't percieved to be in my personal space. I kept a
virtual wall up in place of the real wall that should have
been there. So people end up feeling ignored because I was
simply refusing to pay attention to likely distractions.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Your example is one of a regular boom/bust. IT workers not only had to grapple with the dotcom crash, they also face offshoring and the H1-B visa program, two things your father did not have to deal with. In fact, some companies have continued to use the H1-B visa program, despite offshoring jobs and laying off thousands of workers. Another limit on job mobility is the sky high cost of health care - not so bad when you're a healthy 20 something, but it's a different story if you develop a disability or have a family.
Being an asshole is an important part of convincing people you're a software Guru. It sure beats working for a living.
I tried this before. During my review (I had been with the company 5 year at that point), I was told that over the last 5 years, I could be attributed to $6 million in savings or additional revenue to the company (it was a small company, with a gross profit of about $12M/year and about 80 employees). In telling him that people in my position at other small companies were valued at about $60k/year, and I felt I was worth a similar amount (I think I was making something like $50k at that point), he asked me to turn in my keys on the spot. I was called a traitor and selfish for asking for a reference letter, and not a 'team player'. I guess the working overtime, nights and weekends all the time was worthless to them. But that's OK, because I'm now at my dream job that I hope to hold for a very long time.
kissing ass. That will take you a lot further than hard work and relevant skills.
You appear not to have understood what the OP was saying.
He didn't say they were better programmers; he said they were smarter. If you're hiring someone with a PhD to crank out code, you're wasting their time and your money.
A PhD is a research degree; that means they're trained in solving problems. It is, typically, a high-level degree, in the sense that details like code matter only insofar as they represent ideas. If you want someone to come up with ideas for tackling a viciously-hard problem, the guy with the PhD is your man; if you want someone to implement a mostly-known solution...say, one that the clever PhD just hacked up a prototype of...then the experienced coder is your girl. If you mistake one for the other, you're woefully misusing your staff's abilities.
A PhD is training for a particular type of work, and it's a mistake to assume they should be like BSc degreed folk only moreso. It's a common mistake, but it's a big one.
(General disclaimer: on average, exceptions exist, blah blah. We're talking generalizations here, so it's pointless to respond with an anecdote about an exception - we all already know they exist, so chill.)
When I hear talk of people leaving the IT field I have to wonder, what exactly are they getting into? Are they going back to school, do they know someone or know someone who knows someone where they can get in with another company?
:) ) in the new state to establish residency, one year of post-bac, and now on the second year of the masters program and about to graduate in May.
I am one of the many leaving IT, and I am heading into chemical engineering.
When I was 25 (5 years ago), I had worked about 4 years for IBM's Software Group and could see the writing on the wall: the best talent I had seen at IBM was being pushed out of the company and the mediocre were staying well-paid to produce code no one needed. Looking around, I noticed further that attempts to start IT unions to enforce company loyalty were going nowhere because so many IT folks have signed on to weird libertarian fantasies about how the world works. I further noticed that everywhere I looked young people (10-18) were getting "into computers" and wanted to be programmers or artists. Ultimately, I saw that a career in IT meant for me at most 20 years of good pay followed by 20 more years of desperately following whatever technical jobs a 45+ year old person could land.
So I decided that I would head up the value chain and become a PE (licensed engineer) who could still use a lot of programming skills in the job (so that my background isn't a complete waste). I moved to another state with several good engineering schools and applied for graduate school. As a domestic I was instantly accepted: turns out that a) a computer science BS CAN be followed by a chemical engineering MS with only about 30 hours (1 year) of post-bac classes, and b) domestic students are quite rare even at very good state schools. One year of full-time programming work (embedded systems, fun!
At school I worked *hard*, as hard as I ever put into my programming jobs. I put together my supplies ahead of time (one decent whitebox system, found a cheap laptop, found two HP-48GX calculators in case one broke), and once started in school began to meticulously develop good habits. Scheduling study time, always using engineering paper (to force the association of "calculator + paper == engineering problem"), stopping by every used bookstore I passed to see if any $5 engineering textbooks were lying around (because a lot of problems in one book are solved as examples in another), and just not letting any of my homework go until I understood it. It helped tremendously that my wife supported me in everything -- that would be a much longer post to detail.
I had chosen a school with a really good career center, and that plus the grades (3.4 GPA) paid off last fall when I interviewed with close to 20 companies. As a ChemE I had chosen some unusual places to look and avoided the standard big oil employers, so I actually stood out from the crowd a bit and had half a dozen second interviews and 3 good offers. After graduation I will begin entry-level engineering work at essentially the same salary I had upon leaving IBM. The town the plant is in is much smaller and cheaper to live in than most of the towns IBM is in, as such my wife and I will be able to afford a house and be much happier overall. Also, this particular plant is hiring rapidly because so many boomers are beginning to retire, and it is critical in this kind of manufacturing that the company culture be preserved through the next generation.
Are they maybe taking a position that's nominally within marketing or accounting and leveraging their IT skills to work on computer systems from within those departments?
I know two other decent folks who stayed in IT. One has been promoted to low-level management, the other to application design. Both feel that are overpaid for their work (read as: could be replaced at the next major upheaval), both are disappointed that their technical skills are getting so rusty. Me OTOH, my code-fu is still OK because
If you've been following the conversational thread, you would know we were discussing the OFFICE. Try and stay on topic. Who the hell cares how your home is laid out?
I came out of school with lots of skills Java, C, SQL, HTML, C# and lots of other stuff. I searched for jobs and found a few, I took the one I felt paid best. I am still in my opinion underpaid.
This doesn't bother me, what bothers me is that the world is expected of me. I am the ONLY software engineer in the engineering group(my job title is actually Electrical Engineer I due to this) and I work with all EEs. Basically I walked into a project that was 2 years in the making. I was told at my interview I would be doing C# code, which wasn't my first choice but was ok. I was told I would get training and eventually they would hire more programmers. I was told I would be the driving force behind development.
Then I started work and learned or system was no written in C# it was written in this peice of garbage Indusoft[www.indusoft.com] which uses a built in scripting language and VBScript. The C# part of the system is a very minor chunk that didn't even work. Now I am expected to build a system in Indusoft to run a factory with a few hundred machines. I was sent to training for indusoft and the trainer told me I was crazy for trying. I relayed this to my boss and he claimed we already had 2 years of almost working code. He wasn;t willing to start over.
So I finished the system. I wrote something insane like 50,000 lines of VBScript alone in 6 months. It actually works...sort of...it doesn't meet their "vision" or the product they want more. I continue to tell them more is impossible in this indusoft package to meet their vision I need to use Java or C# and they continue to tell me we've come too far and they expect me to finish it. I need a real language.
Also, the 2 years of almost working code, I erased it all cause it didn't work at all. The last guy said they system was 80% done which meant it didn;t even start up and did absolutely nothing.
Then after I finish the monster I had to travel the country for 2 months deploying it before it was done and before I had ran a single test. I was told I was to use my customers as guinea pigs and test the system in their production factories. Which meant I shut down 2 factories this summer and got chewed out by the owners. Then I stayed up all night got the factory working and the system finished.
To recap here is my situation:
Then my boss tells me he is not pleased with my work. I tell him what needs to happen for the system to be better. More developers, better programming language, more testing. He said no. I plan to put in 1 year to gain some experience and bail out. The joke is kind of on them becuase I asked for time to write software specs and they said "why would we want to do that" so the spec is in my head. I feel bad for the next college grad they sucker into it
About one year into my first job and got it (50K which wasn't bad for 1987 and a first real job out of engineering school). Nothing has changed much.
The others in the department had the nerve to get mad at me because I had taken all the money.
My response. 'They blew off the budget just to give me enough money to get me to stay. What makes you think the budget was ever anything but bullshit to begin with. Grow a pair you pussies.'
That also worked. Two of the worst oxygen thieves in the department (but unfortunately not the single biggest net negative producer...the project manager) overplayed their hands and quit with nothing else in sight.
Once you've gotten enough money that they actually start to listen to your advice you have to play things differently. Everybody values things based at least partly on what they pay for it. If you boss isn't paying much for your advice he/she will not place much weight on it.
The key as always is knowing your limitations. The boss should generally ignore 25 year olds regarding business plan changes etc. But when the boss is ignoring you regarding the very skill set he hired you for it's a sure sign your not paid enough.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
And then they wonder why their 22 year old CS grads only stick around for 6 months.
Most people crank their music too high because they're using cheap open-air headphones. Good closed-air headphones block most external noise from reaching your ears, so you don't need to overpower it. If you can turn off your music and have a normal conversation while wearing your headphones, they are not suited for this task. $100 for Sennheiser 280s was the best money I ever spent.
physically hitting me
My attorney and I would own the company after I got through with them.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
It's a fuck and chuck employment market.
You mean in the IT world? The IT business is unique in the sense that once it gets to be "good enough" it makes itself largely redundant. It is a support function for other businesses/industries after all.
You're right. I find it funny when it comes to spending money on work related expenses that add to the bottom line - they're more than happy to scream that they don't have enough money. When it comes to management expenses like expensive meals, private jets, $400 hair cuts and the like, it seems they've got so much money they don't know what to do with it.
It has nothing to do with 'more office space' it has everything to do with management actually spending the time (and money) to demonstrate their appreciation for the work subordinates do. Pay for a office Christmas party, give bonus; when they work exceptionally hard, give then a pat on the back - SHOCK! FUCKING HORROR! human relations skills! perish the thought! the very skills one cannot acquire from high and mighty business universities.
I worked at an organisation, I averaged 70-80 hour work weeks; one stretch I worked for 42 days straight without a break.
After 12 months the department I was in charge had gone from one of the worst performing to one of the best; from wastage measured in the double digits to below 1%. From having loss leaders during specials to everything making a profit due to better procurement of stock.
Who made these changes? Me. Did I get any pay rise or kudos? fuck no! I was working quietly and dillgiently hoping that one day the manager of the organisation would say, "hey son, you've done a great job with this department, we need a real can do person like yourself - how about a promotion" - nope, not even that. Not even a damn bonus after all the money I worked to save the company.
Sorry, I don't expect million dollar salaries, I don't expect huge amounts of cash, but I do expect at the very least an attempt by management to acknowledge those who go far beyond what management expects through some form of recognition. I've since left that organisation, and funny enough, under 3 months everything has not only gone backwards but worse than before I started.
Was I offered a job? yes, I told them that they never took the time to give me due respect when I was there, buggered if I was going to bend over backwards for them now!
,,,,but most of them have to do with being fed up.
Everything is a 24/7 emergency, low pay for the level of stress we endure, few employers willing to pay to keep our skills up to date, tons of false promises and many companies reducing IT work to the 21st century version of sweatshops, unreasonable hours......24/7 availabilty, work on holidays and week-ends and the l ist goes on and goes
So if we are treated like that, why would one expect loyalty? I have changed several jobs in the past couple of years simply because the other guy paid more. Still crap no matter where you go, until you make it to the upper ecehlon of management in a company.
Part of that could be that the generation hasn't yet gained the experience to negotiate for better salaries when going out for their first couple of jobs.
My Sysadmin Blog
I got myself some sony big earmuff headphones - no noise cancellation, but it looks like I'm tuning people out (so I get fewer interruptions) and it cuts down the noise by about 5-10 db.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Who said anything about music? Just put the headphones on :)
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I think you may be right. And honestly, I think it's great!
12 years of programming experience, marketing experience, leadership experience, training experience, mean that you can probably "produce" better than your younger competitors. It's not always true, but mostly.
So, rather than taking someone and giving them a 2% raise every year for the rest of their life, you pay what they are "worth." If someone gets older and can't do as much work, they get passed by in the pay department. If someone is too young, and can't produce as much as the experienced people, then pay them less. It's a more honest, and more "incentive-based" system. It's the type of business ethic that has led America to be a world powerhouse for the last century and a half.
- DaftShadow
Maybe my idea was smart for the time and was later invalidated by the way industry developed or maybe it was dumb right from the start. The problem is just that there's so much turmoil in the workforce and it seems so difficult to develop skills that might be useful. My last job was in the construction industry and I saw a lot of people with construction-specific experience get themselves in a world of hurt by being so specialized -- I figured my IT skills would be transferable to another industry while guys who are specialized in land development, acquisitions, etc, might be too tied to construction and incapable of finding decent work when the sector went into a huge decline.
For myself, my strong suit has never been academic study. I find that I do well in a practical setting but test poorly. The hell I'm going through with certs tends to bear that out, I know the material from a "git'r'done" perspective but the tests themselves still kick my ass.
Given my abilities and temperament, it seems like I might be best served by trying to straddle that fine line between infrastructure and applications while keeping current with the certs. A lot of us dotters here make the observation "Well, coding gets shipped overseas but I don't see the plumber going overseas anytime soon." And so long as he isn't slaughtered by cheap-ass unskilled immigrant labor, that will remain true. I think that I will be best-served by sticking with the "speaker-to-techie" job since that will be necessary even if the rest of the IT department goes to Bangalore. The pointy-haired guys refuse to learn computers, they refuse to learn the systems, they refuse to give due consideration to requirements and technical details. If I'm the guy that does that, I'll end up being as necessary (and hopefully paid at least half as well) as a lawyer rather than the janitor whose cleaning is important but can be replaced by any of a dozen other eager applicants.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
What really blows is when entire areas of specialization become obsolete. I mean, aerospace engineering, you wouldn't think that something like that could become a dead-end career but shit, it's sucked since the end of the cold war. It seems that we can't come up with anything peaceful to do with that kind of knowledge. And when the military work does pick back up, the companies want to hire pliant young grads and to hell with the graybeards.
The capitalist response is typically "Well, start your own company." Well shit, not everybody is good at that sort of thing! After all, humans are tribal creatures. Some people are good at this, some people are good at that. People specialize in what they're skilled at and rely on others to be good at what they're good at. That sort of thing served us for the 100k or so years we've been a species on this planet. Very disappointing.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I think the more important question is why were they wasting time/money relying on developers for help desk support??
Didn't you read the last sentence in your quote: The good ones leave. I am working on it, but I am also being picky. I don't want to be stuck like I am again.
Gorkman
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
It doesn't matter whether your technical skills gain you a promotion. At least, not directly. They give you leverage, bargaining power, something to put on your resume. YOU have to be willing to use that though, either to negotiate a higher pay at your current job, or by selling your services to another company. The latter happens to be the more profitable in most cases, but that's just a trend. In the end, your skills and experience are the most valuable things you have, and it doesn't matter if your company realizes that. As long as you realize it, you can use it to your advantage.
Well, unlike 1980 or 1990, these days you can have an engineering MS or BS from a top university and STILL end up screwed, because all the entry-level positions have been handed out to HCL, Tata, Infosys, and the like.
OK, here it is -- my first post on my "new today" Slashdot account. I've been reading /. for some 8 or 10 years now at least, and never felt motivated to join in -- and, lo and behold, here is a topic I really have an opinion on!
I wrote software for a living for about 24 years, then got RIF'ed by my employer the Thursday before 9/11. It wasn't for lack of trying -- I did try, hard. But I set my sights too high for too long, and by the time I realized how much competition I had, all of my real tech skills were obsolete. Now I've been working in low-level retail for 6 years and I'm trying to get certified as a school teacher because nobody will even hire me for an entry level job; even customer service jobs ask for experience I don't have.
Am I really not worthy of a job in IT? I dunno, but I think so. When I still had one, I got good reviews and raises, not to mention plenty of casual praise and unofficial "attaboys" from peers and superiors. But breaking back in to the field has proven so difficult that, after seven years of futility, I've given up trying.
Is this a "You losers don't know what real problems are" rant? Not really. I can see why none of the people I talked to wanted to hire me, i.e., they had better candidates to choose from, based on skill sets and age (yes, it really happens). I'd think that proven native ability to think creatively, act within a team, communicate knowledgably with users and customers, and so on would count for something, but apparently not, or maybe the other candidates have all of that as well; again, I don't know.
But I do know this: It's nowhere NEAR as easy as it used to be to get a job, unless I'm simply not applying for the right positions, and I've applied for a lot. Most of the complaints I've seen in this thread are nothing new, and most of them are basically "I want things better." The only one I really have sympathy with is long hours, and the solution to that is find a boss who understands how counterproductive lots of overtime is (basically, after a certain point, the error rate rises faster than the number of hours worked, and useful work done goes into negative numbers per hour).
BTW, am I trolling for job offers? Once again, not really, although I wouldn't object to a good one. As I said, my tech skills are now pretty much obsolete, and even if someone did need them, I'd need to do some heavy "brushing up," plus for reasons I won't go into, I'm not willing to move. I really have accepted that my IT career is over and I need to move on. But there are still lots of worse ways to try to make a living.
Yeah. Which meant it was a lie since you were promised cake all through the game. Retard. Do you think people are saying the very existence of cake is a lie?
If we are supposed to be the "face of the company" I don't understand why we shouldn't be taken better care of. My face has dark bags under my eyes from the nights of lost sleep and my family is beginning to wonder why I don't answer their phone calls as frequently. It is sad times when one has to sacrifice being a part of their family because the higher ups in the company like to only work 5-6 hour days forcing the rest of us to work twice as much.
This is why I left IT altogether. What is the point in putting myself through a situation where is get treated like s&^. I deserve more self respect that to place myself in conditions like that so I chose to do a trade instead (electrician) and keep IT as a hobby. At least that way I still stay interested in IT and not have it killed off by my job
The Tao that can be named is not the Tao
Lone genius walks into company and sees all the problems. No one else sees them. They are all shocked by his genius. Including, of course, the best looking woman in the company. The older people in the company know they are bleeding the company dry, and want the little bastard dead. One of the 'lead' managers, possible creepy looking, wants to bed the best looking woman and knows that money and power is his best bet. So he holds onto his position at all costs, even though he knows he is inept. The natural order is restored when the lone genius defeats the creepy looking man and gets the beautiful woman (of course she wanted him!) and they live Happily Ever After.
Here is something closer to reality:
The concept of the "American Dream" means that no one will ever get paid LESS and the ladder is infinite. The culture of consumption has created many households that spend way too much money competing with the Jones. The baby boomers, being a majority in youth (Peace! Freedom!) and a majority in old age (Greed is good!) are digging in.. hiding in useless management positions, terrified that someone will find out how their faculties are deteriorating and how simple things are becoming hard for them. Sure the younger generation is cocky! Their cocks still work.
Well, yes, that's just the thing: loyalty was never supposed to be a one way street. It always cut both ways, and was _supposed_ to cut both ways.
E.g., a medieval vassal had an obligation to be loyal to his liege-lord, _but_ conversely the liege had a formal obligation to defend his vassal to the full extent of his possibilities too. E.g., a medieval knight was supposed to be loyal to his lord even in the face of death, but conversely he was assured of employment until death. You could take a knights land for treason or such, but otherwise you couldn't go "you're fired. I found a turk who'll do your job for less land." E.g., heck, even the serfs, in exchange for that being formally tied to their lord, could expect the lord's protection. (Though how seriously some lords took that obligation, that's a whole other story.) That's how the whole manorial system was formed in the wake of the crash of the Roman Empire. Etc.
So it's kinda funny to see people nowadays trying to turn it into a one ways street. See, you have a duty to be loyal to us, but we have a duty to not give a damn about you. It never worked that way, and it wasn't supposed to work that way.
Which is why I say they should choose which they want. Not both. Either it's all-out capitalism, they treat you like a replaceable commodity, but then accept that equally the theory is that they're a replaceable commodity too. Or the demand unconditional until-death-do-us-part loyalty, but then they're supposed to provide exactly the same loyalty in return.
I'm not even saying which they should use. Either could be argued for or against, and whole economic theories and apologies have been written about both. Pick one. I may disagree with one or the other on a theoretical level, but I can respect someone who actually is honest in picking one and living by what he/she preaches. Right or wrong, at least it's living by one's principles. I can respect that.
And, yes, just to agree with you some more, it does seem pretty clear which they chose. And they're just getting the other side of the coin they chose. The least they could do is stop moaning about it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Nary a word about the managers and MBAs who avidly read the WSJ to find out who's making $232 million this year...and so weekly come up with new ways to save money or "better" ways to do things so that they can justify demanding more salary and perks from the board.
Inevitably, they always orient their efforts around "squeezing labor", and anybody who isn't them is by definition labor.
If they have five to seven meetings a week to discuss "direction and efficiency" it can only help to lower costs - to them, that's as plain as the dollar signs in their eyes.
And it IS cheaper to squeeze more programmers into cubicles; far fewer construction requirements, and even the cleaning bill is lower...why, they can even use fewer lighting fixtures, so they get kudos for "being green", too!
And look - all the C++ guys are getting a little long in the tooth...but that is the wrong way to look at it. If they could be replaced in mass with C# guys, that would "bring a wave of new blood in to invigorate the company and jump-start creativity".
Incidentally, the new hire salary requirements would be far lower, and statistically their impact on corporate health benefit copays would also be lower...and if we use H1Bs...hmmm...
And hey, why not put the analysts, DBAs, and programmers over by all the copy machines - its all "tech stuff", right?
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
As Mr Nash pointed out, the whole mathematical model that supports the market presupposes that no one ever considers anything beyond "who's paying most for least".
If people actually develop a moral sense and use it to drive their actions rather than operating on pure greed, the market model breaks down and things that seemed predictable as the seasons collapse. That's collapse, as in goodbye, gone, kaput.
This problem isn't going to get fixed. People HATE corporations because they're evil, and only those who don't give a fuck about anyone work for them without being compelled by desperation. Interestingly enough, people who don't give a fuck about anyone are more likely to land your corporation in court than anything else.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Millennials are coming in with high expectations and are disillusioned about the reality of a work place. They feel they should be rewarded and start at the top, when we all know you have to work your way up. They have been raised to be rewarded often and when you get into the workforce those rules change a bit
Yea, right. That's why I'm making 33% more this year than last year, right? Because I'm disillusioned and unreasonable, so nobody would ever meet my crazy demands.
More like: because I'm not an idiot. Companies don't offer a pension anymore, and I can roll my 401k over just about anywhere I go. It's more probable that I'll be able to move into a management position by moving to another company (most of the places I see don't even bother to seek internally for promotion half the time), so maybe these jackholes who think I have an entitlement mindset would like to explain what, exactly, benefits I'll receive by being loyal?
Most companies treat employees like shit. Young workers have a lot less to lose by taking risks and job-hopping. If they want to retain young talent they can mold, then maybe they ought to stop fucking people over so their investors can get a few extra cents per share, or so the CEO can get an extra ten million for running the fucking place into the ground.
I'm sick of these bullshit articles about how fucked up young workers are. I'm talented, I have the portfolio and resume to prove it, and I'm not going stick around and get a shaft up my ass because of some arbitrary sense of loyalty when the company would kick me to the curb in a half a second if they thought it would help an executive's bottom line.
If you want to retain me, make me happy. Otherwise, go suck a dick. It's not MY fault that YOU can't offer a decent work environment and your competitor can.
Get a four year degree in anything, and you are a shoe in for becoming an officer (I served under a weapons officer who had a degree in English).
Sure you will start as a junior grade officer, but you will be compensated (pay and benefits) vastly better than the average enlisted person.
It never surprised me that Mustangs (officers who were former enlisted) were always better leaders, while the rest were just managers.
Ramen
Who are you referring to? The companies whose idiot employees who put their retirement money 100% into their own company's stock?
"I'm really just looking for some validation that the place really does suck. And I'm not crazy for looking for employment elsewhere."
That place does indeed suck, and yes you should go find work somewhere else.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
>>chasing the mythical perfect job.
>Exactly what is wrong with this?
Perfect jobs don't exist. All jobs suck to at least some degree. (OK, sure somebody gets to be a porn star or something, but the most part, I feel safe in saying that all jobs suck at least a little.) In my experience, the jobs that paid the inexperienced folks the most were the poorest run companies. Microsoft and Accenture both hire tons of young folks, work them like dogs, and don't pay that much to start. Yet they seem to do OK as career entry points.
A lot of kids have fairly idealistic expectations about life and work, and realistically, those ideals are rarely met. I have had lots of kids work for me move on in search of that 'perfect gig' come back and tell me that they didn't realize how good they had it. If you can find a job where the people are decent to each other, your boss is at least half human, and the company is making money, think hard before you move.
At the end of the day, you can earn only as much as you contribute, and not even all of that, as the company has to cover rent and profit. If you want to make good money, figure out how to make good money for your company. Then the rest is just negotiation.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
*Sigh*
I RTFA article and it's nice to hear one side reported; but I feel there's a whole other side to this that's not understood. Most "millenials" that I've met have very little concept of business and business finances.
The average worker expects to sit around and do as they are told and basically "be taken care of". The average worker never sits down with their boss and says "I'm making X and I want to be worth X+10%, what do I need to do?". There's an expectation that simply showing up will get you there. Most workers I've met simply let the company decide their next step. I've even met tons of smart and skilled developers who simply don't know the math behind their salary. They can't ask for a pay raise or different benefits or some other employer concession, they don't even know how much they're worth. They don't know what income they generated last year or the typical overhead cost on their time.
Meanwhile, from the other side, most companies I've known are simply terrible at managing workers and projects and growing their #1 assets. They set up win/lose pay structures that heavily reward management instead of the workers. They ask for more work hours instead of more project deliverables. They expect employees to train outside of work instead of accounting for the cost of "in-the-week" training time. They ignore the concept of "apprenticeships" and the time required and just add juniors to the team as a single unit of time (instead of the .2 units of time they actually generate). They fail to build progression plans (including scheduled pay increases for young workers) and then wonder why they get caught with their pants down when the best young workers leave for more money and the bad ones hang around.
It's a two-way street and there are ample examples of failure on both sides. There are tons of "sweatshop" workplaces and tons of workplace Princesses. So it's really hard to yell at anyone in particular.
No one seems to have hit this yet. As an employer, the best thing I can do to retain the brightest and best is to provide an environment for personal and professional growth.
As an employee, I'm certainly not going to jump ship for $10k more a year if I think I'll grow less or my goals and values are less aligned with the company. Conversely, if I'm placed in a dead-end project for 2+ years doing something I don't love, or is easily outsourced at a later date, don't expect me to stick around.
The original article is pretty bad. Salary is not a primary motivator. If you think it is, it's most likely because you're unhappy with some other aspect of your work.
The 'retention' problem is not because this generation wants the kitchen sink; it's because these companies don't have any money to buy kitchens.
Horseshit - they don't have money for the little people because they keep giving the CEO and the board of directors a 20% annual pay increase regardless of their actual performance. If the minimum wage had risen at the same rate as executive compensation over the last few decades, it would be over $50 an hour.
I agree completely. I have been interviewing people for several years now and I can see that the overall quality has dropped considerably.
The new generation has:
a) No work ethic (eg: SMS lingo in business emails and communication. Poor etiquette)
b) Next to no social skills (eg: Picking up calls on their cell when a meeting is in progress)
c) An entitlement mentality (they feel they have earned it - even on their first day at work)
d) No attention span (give them some work to do and they will be on chat and email with their friends/coworkers while they should be working)
e) Know-it-all-attitude coupled with a feeling that if you are older than them by 5+ years that you are a dinosaur.
I am not surprised they consider themselves having the right to demand high pay because they are also quite deluded.
Regardless if it sucks or not, if you can do better, you should do better.
The managers bemoaning retention would jump at a nice new job, with a
pay increase and better hours, etc etc.
Do not feel some job is your 'destiny' even if it sucks.
Even in a bad economy you can find another job that doesn't
suck as bad as the last one, though it may not pay as well.
It is just a job unless your savings lives, minds, hearts, or sanity.
Widget/Service seller/maker ABC-whatever is one of MANY companies.
Leave on good terms if you can, but as always, if your miserable there
it will start to affect your state of mind, health, etc.
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Great read on your post here jollyreaper. That is exactly how I see the state of things currently facing our economy as well. I have worked now for 12 years in the IT field. The current job I have is the only one that I can see myself staying at for 10 years; because its not going under. What is it exactly? A casino IT job. Gambling is a vice and its also an addiction. The casino's who expand and pull in more traffic arent going anywhere. Its sad to see the state of business across America, and I am gripping onto whatever I can today to try and stay afloat when the plunge comes.
"Don't let the past dictate who you are, only let it be part of who you become..."
There are many horror stories about people that have tried to do this and ended up out of a job 6-12 months later. The proper way to handle it is to submit your letter of resignation. If the company really needs you, they may say "is there anything we can do to make you stay?" and at that time, you might mention the possibility of a salary increase. Even if you are successful, remember, you will always be "tainted" to them from that point on, and if there is ever a time they need to let someone go, you'll be the first one they think of.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
No, I'm talking about the traditional kind of pension that pays you a fixed amount per month after you retire. The workers thought that since the company would likely be around forever they could count on it. They didn't realize that companies could intentionally go bankrupt and transfer their assets to "another" company and welch on their agreements.
It's finance.
Offices are part of the building, are therefore considered an asset, and the cost to build it depreciates with the building, over 25 years.
Cubicles are considered "Office Furniture" and depreciate at a much faster rate (7 years?), or you rent them and they end up on the balance sheet as a cost rather than an asset.
You don't get an office because you don't rate high enough in the chain to be worth 25-year, prolonged depreciation for your work space.
FTEs get cubicles. Executives get offices.
My Heart Is A Flower
My last job was with a construction company so I feel your moral pain there. With the way things are going in this country, the only job titles left open will be CEO and fry cook. That's not something to base an economy on.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The whole premise is of the article is warped.
"The issue is with retention, not hiring."
Exactly right. Millennials have learned that corporations do not give a fuck about them or their well-being, so they have absolutely no corporate loyalty whatsoever. They are ALWAYS looking for greener pastures. Most of them wouldn't think twice about selling company secrets if they could get away with it. Blame the modern business culture that treats workers like disposable razors, don't blame the workers.
So the fallacy leads to the notion that companies (the groups which supply the market place) will either screw themselves or they will respect their labor as real people instead of as a commodity who's marketplace value can be manipulated. I personally don't see most American managed companies doing the respect thing and that leaves companies screwing themselves. But wait, if companies screw themselves then it will create supply problems which creates problems for everyone in the market place (except the rich who ran the companies into the ground in the first place).
As a forty year old who has worked at the same place for 22 years and will have that pension coming when I am 48, All I see is the pendulum swinging the other way. I'll be leaving this labor market and going into another... and I am not going to whine one single bit. Instead, I'll be making jokes about Americans while I am half a world away. ahahah
An enlightened boss would realize this, and have a flexible working arrangement where everybody could choose the environment they are more productive i
Actually, my boss (well, CEO) figured this out quite a while ago and seems to be doing pretty well with it.
Wow, now that's a retarded statement.
How exactly will you know whether the new job will be better before you've already burned your bridges with the old one?
Through networking with ppl you can often find someone that knows a person
that still works there, or used to work there.
You could even even ask around anonymously in local
online chatrooms, the ex-workers have little to fear
of telling the truth about the place.
You can get an idea of what is like from that person.
If you are a little less honorable, a parabolic mic,
or laser audio detector on the break room window should
give you sufficient dirt on what is going on from a very
respectable range.
Sometimes the truth is important enough to check a place
out before you put on the yoke as a sled dog once again.
What I have learned from a distance has saved me lots of
money from unscrupulous ppl, and let me know what ppl really
think of me instead of the fake plastic faces they show you
when your around.
Call me paranoid, but it is becoming an ugly world.
Adios~
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
My only complaint with your comments is about the "the children won't be better off than the parents" concept. If the parents teach the children that it's not about money, or toys, or huge consumer debt, and base the children in something else (you decide... religion, moralism, humanism, whatever -- something "bigger" than just acquiring shit), the children WILL be better off than the parents, because they'll know when times really ARE good and it'll make them happy.
My grandparents were depression-era kids. They were always happiest when they had a roof over their heads that was relatively affordable, 3 squares a day, good friends, and a little fun time each week. It was rare to see my grandfather not work a 6-day work week, but he was never UN-happy about any of it.
He's 90 now, and he's still one of the most content people I know. Also one of the most grounded in reality. He once owned a Model-T. His aging Ford Taurus is a lighting rocket compared to his first car, and so much more reliable and safe... and he knows it. Deep down he knows things are fundamentally "better" than his childhood, and that keeps him happy and engaged... which is how he lived to be so old and was mostly content along the way.
Children who grow up chasing after things instead of deeper good never find happiness. In that, if you say they won't be better off than their parents -- you're right -- they won't. They'll be just as miserable or worse.
+++OK ATH
To keep to the point of the article...
Then those idiots DESERVE to lose staff to managers who "get it", right?
I see no problem here. Keep looking if you're stuck in cubicle hell and a cubical is inappropriate for the type of work that you do.
The company's only feedback mechanism is that high turnover rate they're bitching about, and don't understand. They never will, either.
Some places are revolving doors as it relates to staffing, for a reason. They deserve to die off.
+++OK ATH