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IT Job Market Is Tanking, But Not For Everyone
CWmike writes "Shortly after the COO of Automated HealthCare Solutions learned that Microsoft planned to cut 5,000 workers over the next 18 months, he and another employee of the medical services provider flew out to Redmond. AHCS now has more than 100 resumes, some of them from Microsoft employees, for about a dozen open positions. That's how the tech job market is these days: there's no doubt the market is tanking, but not for everyone. While numerous IT vendors are laying off workers, and corporate IT jobs are being lost as well, plenty of companies are still hiring. Microsoft's careers site lists more than 700 open jobs in the US, both technical and administrative positions. And IBM has about 3,200 jobs and internships listed worldwide, more than 550 of them in the US — even as it cuts thousands of workers in a move that it is describing not as a layoff, but an effort to 'match skills and resources with our client needs."
If you're good, you can always find a new job. Smart companies always have exception programs to let in talented individuals. Layoffs tend to be a way to get rid of a lot of the sub-average to average performers. If anything, finding good quality people is even more important after layoffs are announced- the good ones have the ability to get hired easily, so they'll hedge their bets by looking as soon as layoffs are announced. Its not uncommon to see an exodus of them before the layoffs actually occur. Plus you can typically hire one of them to do the work of 3 or 4 of the people you just fired.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
That does not mean they will fill the reqs. These could be aged openings, and they could be there to give false indicators of growth or expected growth for a presumed 2-year position life expectancy.
Even more, they could silently have in effect a hiring freeze. So, recruiting agencies will *see* postings of openings, and some will scrounge around and competing really hard for those spots for their recruits/temps or consultants, but not get much food out of it.
Further, many of those positions could be advertised as one thing, but become something else as needs change. It's happened to me, where i interviewed (as a temp, over a 5-6 year period) for a position, but because of things in my resume i either became a non-fit (too much experience in some areas), and other times my resume forwarded by an agency didn't convey the whole picture, so my in-person handed resume cinched the opportunity. So, I learned to *always* bring in my own copies the agencies didn't edit. On top of that, I gave a long (5-6 pages) and a chopped-up (bulleted, 1-2 pages) resume. Sometimes that helped because the had... "options": speed read, and dig deeper.
It's going to be ROUGH as hell for all those people competing (qualified and hopeful, but unqualified) for positions which are (being) published but effectively frozen.
If the EU and others chafe over the "buy American" clauses, the Obama administration will have few choices: give in, in the respect for globalism over protectionism, or shift that stimulus money from tech and goods to direct labor costs of people eligible FOR and having the right TO work available only to citizens or those visitors with the appropriate visas and proof of experience.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
The behavior of "cutting the fat" is persistent in any business worth it's salt. It just so happens that this behavior is synchronized, and expanded, in weaker economies.
A person desiring to keep their employment intact, or finding new opportunities, needs to understand three elements of their "business related worth".
Every company on the planet needs people who have different mixes of the above qualities. The big problem is that these three aspects run in a Rock/Paper/Scissors manner. The bigger problem is that the relationships change from company to company. Sometimes experience trumps talent. Other times talent is better than experience.
If you approach these elements of your work history without ego, focus your job search on opportunities that match your mix, and clearly communicate them to prospective employers - you will actually find a better job that makes you happy.
It can be done, don't go into it with a negative attitude.
Not that smart. If I see too many people around me fired, I'll look for a new job before you get around to firing me.
If I'm good, and you want to keep me - I'll find another job.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
Being good includes the ability to handle office politics successfully. Jobs that don't require office politics are incredibly rare.
If you can't find anybody in your old company that likes you, you probably need to work on your social skills. It's one of the things employers need to make sure the job gets done.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
In this sentence:
"While numerous IT vendors are laying off workers, and corporate IT jobs are being lost as well, plenty of companies are still hiring."
should read:
"While numerous *LARGE* IT vendors are laying off workers, and corporate IT jobs are being lost as well, plenty of *SMALLER* companies are still hiring."
If anything I've seen the job market for small IT suddenly go UP. I'm willing to bet these smaller companies are willing to hire these former big-wig employees and those big-wigs are willing to take the lower pay in exchange for financial security in this horrendous economy.
The big guys are tanking and having to cut because they squandered and litigated themselves into this mess, while the smaller companies don't have this bullshit to worry about and can thus keep turning a profit because they're not wasting money on laws and lawsuits and patent trolling - they just provide actual services, pay their employees, pay their taxes, and go home.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The theory is to fire the lowest 10% in relation to performance every quarter. Ugly, yet effective.
Ugly yes, but only effective in the very short term. 10% per quarter equals 40% turnover per year. No highly-qualified candidate you interview is going to want to hear this number and the best ones are certain to find it out either from you or other sources.
Further, you'll be spending huge amounts of time trying to find new personnel to replace the ones you let go or cross/retrain the existing ones to do the work that the laid off ones did. Productivity will grind to a halt and your company will be in really deep shit compared to your competitors who didn't dig themselves in the hole you dug yourself.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
I've been through many layoffs in companies large and small. In smaller companies, the layoffs tend to be draconian - often 20 pct of the staff or more - and they often come with little warning. In larger companies, the percentages are usually less, and usually there's not too much surprise about the timing, but when you look at the cut list and try to figure out the rationale, here's what stands out:
"Which people do we want to work with?"
In other words, managers making the cut decisions in larger companies don't think like owners or shareholders, vexing over what Jack Welch would have done in their shoes. They think like people living in a community, making decisions on which neighbors are worth keeping and which they'd rather do without. And I'm not saying it's all a popularity contest, but personality and chemistry are substantial factors.
I'm not saying that's bad or good, it's just an observation.
The "fire 10%" strategy has the interesting side effect of ruthlessly exposing the quality of your performance metrics. If they are quite good, it might actually work. If they are indifferent or worse, you'll cut your own throat in short order. Nothing like an office full of people gaming the metrics and covering their asses to get things done.
Advice for the sub average? Well if you are sub average then you're always going to be at high risk. The same applies to any industry - it is not just a computer thing. Find something you're better at.
If you're sub average and insist on being in the industry then face it that you're only going to be employed 50% of the time.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Schools will always turn out code monkeys. You can't learn innovation and leadership in the classroom - you have to learn them by applying them.
Yes, but especially today there is very little innovation being used/taught in the classroom. Whereas in the 1980s or 1990s you would get high marks for finding a different, better way of coding a program, today the "know-it-all" IT professor is more apt to fail you because you didn't do it his way that might have actually been a disaster. There also seems to be less innovation in the workplace. It used to be that faster ways were praised and lead to promotion, today they are frowned upon because innovation makes it a pain to teach the secretary how to use it.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
BUSTED
Oh, here we go, cue the chorus of "Dude, if yer the best you can alwayz get werk..."
Listen up. You have to look at this systemically. If there are a thousand people willing to do your job for less, it doesn't matter how leet and brilliant you are. You are an expensive widget, and the business side will always sacrifice quality for cost. Do you really think the suits upstairs can tell the difference between Linus and Zaboomafoo the Typing Lemur?
My phone rings daily with scared-crapless kids whose networks are falling apart because they don't have the experience the position requires. Every one of those kids replaced some grey-haired 40-year-old who would have avoided the disaster months ago, but was let go because Billy the Paperboy braindumped his certs and offered the do the job for less.
No one, No. One. Ever connects the million-dollar disaster with the now-incredibly-cheap-looking salary that would have saved the company untold amounts of money.
So, for the Beavis-and-Butthead crowd sitting around crowing about how they're the best, look at it this way: The surplus resumes flooding the market may not cost you your job, but they will cost your your raise, as well as any leverage you might have had to push back against bad ideas. They'll cost you in the midnight calls you get and the tribute of overtime demanded because your boss knows you don't have any other options. And if you really are that good, it still might not save you.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
After 2 years, I just filled a Jr Linux admin position. Of the hundreds of resumes, most applicants did not even read the posted job requirements. A couple of the more persistent applicants begged to be hired; and they promised to allow me to teach them Linux. Of the interviewed applicants, most could not solve a simple problem -- they asked for hints, lists of possible solutions from which to choose, or shrugged their shoulders as if abandoning the problem was commonplace and acceptable.
Complacency is the rot from within; and, unfortunately, complacency is rampant.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
The princess probably wants to spend $50,000 on one day so she can have her dream wedding.
Seriously, society's expectations of what should happen with a wedding are seriously out of whack - especially now that the couple are expected to pay for it all. The young couple, at the start of their life, are expected to pay for a very expensive party for their friends and their parents' friends with the better part of a deposit for a house while they continue to pay off student loans.
Whatever happened to just jumping over a chair?
(I'm not actually trying to troll. I hope the OP is very happy in his marriage.)
I liked your post. Here, let me go ahead and make it true as well for you:
of course, I could be wrong. what's your salary?
All those jobs that were lost that weren't "true" IT jobs, do you think they don't impact you?
Connect the dots. Those unemployed people are now out of work. They get the following advice: "Your skills are obsolete, you need to retrain!" Well, which jobs do you think they retrain for? They all rush out and get their MCSAs and CCNAs, because they've been told "We have a shortage of IT workers in this country!"
So now, for every job, thousands of resumes flood in, and it doesn't matter that we're talking about a million-node network that really ought to be sheparded by some MsEE/double CCIE with 15 years of experience, all HR reports is that the job posting attracted 5,000 resumes, which means the suits upstairs assume the candidates for this task are a dime a dozen. They old "If you don't like it, I can have a dozen people to replace you tomorrow" mindset creeps in.
When the H1-B visas first began, domestic employees crowed "They'll never match us on quality." A couple of decades down the line, we discovered they didn't have to -- simply by flooding the market they distorted the wage curve down. The suits looked at two codebases -- one a thing of elegant beauty with 1,000 lines, the other an Abomination Before God with 3,000 lines, and decided the one with more text reflected three times as much work and therefore value.
Unemployment IN GENERAL is a bad thing for people who sell labor. It takes cards out of your hand and puts them in the hands of employers. Don't kid yourself -- those people losing their jobs bodes ill for you.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
A lot of us here on /. are IT workers, why not just ask us?
How has the current economic landscape affected your employer?
It might actually provide some useful insight. #6 applies to me.
Not all companies are populated by morons in the hiring positions.
Right now the good people will raise to the top as long as you are willing to adjust your expectations slarywise.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Oh bullshit. And just who are they going to sell services to? The US? The EU? Each other?
The major fucking debacle that's going on right now is being blamed on US consumers by some folks overseas, because we cannot leverage ourselves further to by their cheap crap. Hell, China just sent 20 million peasants packing back to the countryside and Germany (also a net exporter) is feeling the pain as well. India? Right. Talk with me when they pull the other 700 million of their countrymen out of poverty.
Don't even get me started on China's arable land and water supply issues. I seriously worry that they and Russia are going to go toe-to-toe over resources and the Russkies are going to have no choice but to fry them ala Topol-M.
The future is not going to be great for any of us, but things like energy and water, which are going to be bad for the US, will be horrible for China and India. In fact it's catching up with them right now. Around 2020 look for the implosion to begin.
And as far as innovation goes: I've worked with some damned fine engineers from India, China, UK, Russia, Poland, AND the US. We're competitive. We've just gotten a bit fat and have a couple of years of pain coming our way. This is a crash diet that we've needed for a long time.
Or hell, just understand that on-the-job learning is part and parcel of being a software developer. The idea that every hire must match some fixed set of criteria is really quite silly... better to hire someone who has demonstrated, through their work experience, an aptitude for learning on their feet, than someone with some finite skillset.
Yup...
Worked 15 years optimizing software-- took it from a 63,000 line "contractor late on a deadline" mess to a 18,000ish line clean machine. Then a competitor bought our company, boxed the software, closed the company, and tried to take on our customer list (lost 90% of them because they hated our competitor). On a related note, we were told everything was okay and we would remain in business- I left immediately and it was 5 months later that they shut us down. Our business was profitable too.. made about half a million profit a year and employed about 200 people.
While at that company... we converted computers. I worked my ass off. I worked about 72 hours a week for two months. At the end of that period, they gave me a $50 bonus and half a Friday off. I have never let a company do that to me since and it's been almost 20 years and I am now a low level manager. The time to get bonuses negotiated is up front. If they won't promise hard cash up front, I'll do a good solid non-heroic job.
Young pups willingly give up the time of their life that they are the healthiest, in the best shape, and even smell and taste better than they will by the time they get to my age. You can't give up your life for a company.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Explain to your hiring manager that Linux skills are 99% interchangeable with with "Unix" skills and watch your costs go down and responses go up.
The largest, most cost-effective data storage company on the planet uses Linux boxes and commodity hardware. But I'll bet you're searching for people whose sole experience is with some obscure 20-year-old Unix OS in conjunction with some overpriced proprietary NAS device.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"