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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."
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
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.
* 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.
One thing that matters very much is location. There are universities across the U.S. in places where there's very little call for the graduates they produce. That's the situation I was in when I got out of undergrad—and it was several years before I got smart and headed for the coasts.
I think for undergrads at the top of their class in NYC or DC there is always something to do. For undergrads at the top of their class in New Mexico or Montana or Wyoming or Utah this may not be the case, especially for undergrads in very clearly "academic" fields like the humanities or the social sciences.
It's yet another thing we should probably be warning kids about: "You realize that if you get a college degree and want it to help your career, it basically means moving to one coast or the other for at least a decade or so, right?"
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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
So now that you don't have to extra work hard to provide for your children's future, we're blaming these people's upbringings as lazy? The problem isn't stated as "hiring", or "bad workers", but of "retention". Newsflash: less and less now, young people don't need you, but you need them. They're starting their own websites, their own companies, while you're losing employees to retirement, and they're coming in with new skills and technologies that will drive your company to compete.
So when it comes around for performance reviews a year later, everyone looks back at what they've gone through, and realized that their time is being wasted. Too many meetings, too much cost micromanagement, over goals that they simply don't care about. And so new hires are now looking elsewhere, for some place where their work might matter to people they meet around town. Employers might talk about managing unreasonable expectations, but I've seen many dog and pony shows telling potential software engineers that they have great retention rates, they have great benefits, but when you talk to friends who took the job there, it's radically different than the people they trotted out to tell you about the Corporate Experience.
Basically, stop telling me you have a great workplace while I overhear two people who interned there talking about working 45 hour weeks on a project that wound up getting canned.
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Open Source Sysadmin
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.
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.
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.
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!