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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."
You don't see people walking around asking the hard questions like 'do we need to get rid of anybody', because there is profit, and everything is going well, something can trigger that talk, like the global "finance" crisis at the moment, and you'll see things like this happening, when you start looking, the bigger the company you are, the more you'll find. It's the way of business.
A couple of business owners have had to lay off some of their skilled labour, it was a last resort, because they know it's going to cost a fortune to replace them when things pick up again.
Something that everyone forgets is that many companies use downturns as a time to clean house, to get rid of people that they feel are more dead weight than not.
Now anyone with experience in a large company knows that also can include some good people that ended up on the wrong side of an internal political battle, and doesn't usually include much middle management that may well be overburdened. Even so, layoffs are not always about a company needing to get rid of jobs so much as a natural resetting mechanism (at least at first).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I used to believe that. I've got a damn good resume, and I'm damn good at what I do. I'm working the network of friends and ex-coworkers, all of who say, "damn we'd love to hire you, but we don't have any openings."
I'm 38 years old, and I've NEVER experienced anything this shitty.
damn.
We're on hiring freeze despite a sizable number of openings posted.
Good point. Since people use job openings to judge the health of a company, it's possible to use it to send a misleading signal to the stock market.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
Here in Mass, I just went through a fairly time consuming round of interviews for an open Sr. Linux Admin position I had open. I must have had more than 300 resumes come my way, reviewing about 200 of them, phone interviewed about 25 people, personally interviews another 15, all over the course of the past 5 months. My bosses were having a very difficult time comprehending why I was having such a hard time finding someone in such a market, but frankly, quality people have been tremendously hard to come by. My bosses were getting frustrated that I wasn't getting the position filled fast enough. I stuck to my guns and recently (finally!) found a solid candidate.
It has already been mentioned, but in speaking with a few recruiters, the general opinion was that the company's that are laying off are cleaning house of dead wood for the most part. Those who are good at their jobs are staying put right now until the market seems to show some sense of light at the end of the tunnel. Of course their are casualties at all levels in various orgs, but I'm not yet left with the overwhelming sense that quality IT people are flooding the market looking for work.
Are the jobs being laid off REALLY Information Technology? I hardly consider sales, data people, or most management positions IT. They might be IT related in that they work with IT people, but they do nothing actually technical and I would not be calling any of them to repair a network or fix a computer. In the same way I dont consider engineers to be IT either, they are engineers, not technicians, related but still different fields.
When it comes to actual IT work, I have no want for job opportunities atm, getting at least one valid offer a month, though I am specifically staying with my not as well paying public position BECAUSE of a questionable private sector market. Be seriously most of these jobs being shed are just not true IT job, and people need to learn what the actual definition of IT is and isnt.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
There has been a steady but rising flood of semi-skilled people getting into IT increasing the size of IT shops ... and generally their cost. I don't like to see people lose jobs, but in some cases shrinking IT is really, really good. I don't want to work with 50 so-so or worse developers or sysadmins ... but I'd be more than happy to work with 10 stellar engineers/admins. Same goes with management. Speaking with some friends this past year it almost seems there has been a popular trend in adding layers of management for the sake of reporting structures (group A reports to manager who reports to manager who reports to director who reports to ....). In a lot of cases that is just cruft that is not needed that increases cost for little to no gain.
Then again, I've seen the definition of IT being stretched to include positions that have nothing to do with Information Technology.
I feel this is a good time to discuss my signature.
.sig as just a reminder of that horrible incident. So, think not of my signature as a juvenile C joke intended to frustrate an experienced DOS user, but instead the C port of the subroutine patch that costed me a Microsoft job at the time when, as a company, they were just about to reach their peak. Layoffs are not funny, even if caused by such a humorous-at-first-glance patch.
Years ago, when MS-DOS was just entering version 5, I worked for Micro(-)soft, and I was on the shell team. One little optimization could be made to the PAUSE function, I thought, so I added it in, and even when I told my manager of the patch, he said surely a promotion would soon ensue, and Dave Cutler might even consider me for this project called "Windows NT"!
So everyone approved, and the patch was added. It was written in assembly language, by the way. So the patch was added, and soon the final build of MS-DOS 6 shipped. However, soon we started getting calls from users saying their batch files crashed DOS, and a thorough code inspection went under way. While inspecting the last couple of patches, many bugs were found, some even I fixed, and we were sure MS-DOS 6.21 was the final solution.
How wrong were we! The test batch files still crashed the OS, and upon further inspection, it was found that the PAUSE() function would crash just after printing the characters to the screen. They inspected my patch, found an erroneous jz mnemonic (despite our getch setting the eax [return] register to a non-zero ASCII character).
The log showed it was my patch, and I was soon speedily fired before the compilation of MS-DOS 6.22, which corrected the PAUSE function I messed up so bad. I have since regretted that function every day of my life, and I put it in my
Never forget, slashdot, never forget.
Please don't think me greedy for what I'm about to say but I'm currently still employed after over 3 rounds of layoffs and I've recently kicked my job search into high gear. While I have to agree that what's currently left at the small company I work for is nothing but the best (at least in the IT department) the workload that was done by 30 is now done by 10 -- with as few as 3 people in one section of IT.
That being said, these *quality* people who probably have nothing to worry about are jumping ship (even management!), some without even having jobs to switch to yet. But I guess that's what happens when reason goes out the window and marketing calls the shots in an attempt to turn a profit for a change. That coupled with pay cuts leaves a bad taste in people's mouths.
I disagree with the thought that the good workers will sit idly by and take what the companies are doing and accomplishing what 3-5 of their peers used to. Sometimes what seems like a good job for a while can turn ugly and treat you poorly when things get tough and that's not necessarily a place you want to work. At least that's my reasoning.
Funny, I seem to recall something different said about your .sig. Still funny, though, I enjoyed the story, despite the obvious made-up MS-DOS versioning used.
Gotta agree. The price of parts alone puts PC repair just fine if you can do it yourself, but if you plan on charging for your services, then forget it. The screwdriver shop market half collapsed already several years ago. For those willing, it's an ok way to make a few dollars here and there, but very, very few can maintain sufficient business to make a living out of it.
The simple fact is that if the computer isn't in warranty, then it's probably not worth repairing. Outside of that period it's not only outdated technology-wise, but physically if one component has reached the point of failure then all the other moving parts are starting to get within that zone too. Replacing the hard drive now, and the DVD drive in another 8 months, then a few fans in 6 months, then the monitor in another year, etc, and you you're getting to the point where you're paying as much upkeep on keeping your crappy computer working as a new one would cost.
As to used computers - generally a waste. Most people get around to selling a computer because it has issues already, and the ones that aren't problematic are at a minimum going to be fairly outdated. PARTICULARLY laptops, which I'd NEVER recommend buying used. When new systems are as cheap as they are already, it normally just makes no sense to buy a used system.
Besides, the computer is generally a purchase that you make and then hopefully can use for a while. Where people (and companies) are going to makeup their differences is in recurring costs. For citizens, that will mean cutting back on recurring costs in places that you can afford to. Cooking more and eating out less for example. Buying the store brand of an item rather than the name brand. Refinancing loans to a lower rate. Possibly moving into a smaller/cheaper apartment or home. Taking in roommates instead of living alone. Going out to the movies or other recreational activities less.
Companies look at it the same way but salaries are their recurring costs. The simple fact of the matter that I've seen is that in many departments (of all types, IT included), people have adapted to a comfortable work level, but if everyone pushed harder the same work could be done with significantly less people. In a good economy people won't take kindly to that and you can't push them that hard, but when people are afraid of losing their jobs, they'll gladly work a bit harder to pick up the slack.
Cutting those recurring costs will make orders of magnitude more difference than simple purchases like a computer.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Ah, I had more fond memory of doing optimization. I'll chip in my story.
I just graduated in the early 90s, and started working the next day after my last exam, at a small telecom equipments company. The system was running on QNX 2, with every software components developed in house, except the OS and some of the drivers.
The company was built by hardware engineers, and I was the first guy from a CS background. There were 6 people in the engineering group. The "database system" was actually a small engine of simple linked list, and must load all data into memory to do anything. Insertion, modification, deletion, etc, were slow, database-related work is so slow, but everyone was used to it. Especially on a 386SX with 1MB of memory, and QNX had no virtual memory, the physical memory was precious.
After I started working, I saw this and said: "What the fuck?" Being good at data structure and algorithms, I decided to do something. Not to interfere with my day job, I spent a couple of evenings and one weekend, writing a memory-mapped B-tree engine, with some quite primitive transaction and rollback features, while trying to keep the same API as the original linked list engine. The memory-map part was so that I wouldn't have to load all data into memory to do the work.
After testing for 5 or 6 hours on the Sunday afternoon and evening, I plugged it in, replacing the old engine. I "checked in" the code. We didn't even have CVS, we just mount to the manager's machine, and put the codes there (basically, replacing what was there). I made the mistake of not informing the manager.
I went home the evening, it was raining hard, got wet, and had a fever. The next day, I called in sick.
At noon, the manager did a new build for testing. People where shocked that database-related operations just returned back right away. This normally would be an error situation. A few panicked, as there was no CVS to track who checked in what, and the db engine was there for almost 2 years already, and considered the most stable component. So no one looked there. But everything seemed to work just fine.
While I was sick, I also wrote a design document about the new engine, how to call the API, etc. On the 3rd day, I came in. After my first cup of coffee, I heard the news from my neighboring coworker. So I went to see the manager, told him about what I did, and handed him the design document. This was the first "real" design document, BTW.
The manager was relieved and excited, and finally, called in the CEO of the company too, and said: "Dude, you scared the shit out of me, but this is great work. Next time, tell me first before putting in the code, ok? I'm too old for that. BTW, do you see other areas that we can improve?" The CEO said: "I'd like to hear that too." With that kind of encouragement, I gave a list of areas that should be reworked, but with very low risk, and some areas that might need extra works.
The CEO said: "I want you to work on those items".
So, for the next 6 months, I was working more or less on every component of the system, including the UI framework that we developed (no, QNX Photon was still many years away), to do optimization and in quite a few cases, re-code them.
And I also downloaded CVS at home with my oh-so-slow modem (the company has no internet connection yet, only the CEO and VP had dialup), brought the floppy to the company, compiled the CVS source on QNX, asked and got a new machine to build a CVS server, so that we can track the codes better.
At the end of the year, I got a big bonus, with 2 extra days off for the Christmas holiday. It was fun.
I know the feeling, except that of being 38 ;)
I'm an IT janitor. I fix things. No formal training in most fields (but a few certs I feel have some meaning, and some Mirosoft certs I feel are meaningless), but I still do everything (except maybe DBA-type stuff and art). People with all sorts of levels of competence say I should be able to get jobs with Big Name Companies. This I've tried, skillfully avoiding open source-unfriendly companies (not so many anymore, thank fuck). I rarely hear anything back, so I guess the market is either quite full of people like me, or somebody somewhere is spreading crap about me.
So I said "Fuck it!" and have sort of started on my own, doing the usual things. Helping friends and family here and there (different rates for the stupidly rich!), making webpages (being no designer, I'm happy to work with people who do the design with me before I make the magic happen) and thinking up THE iPhone app everybody will want. I'll get back to you when I figure that out :P
A note about those "available positions": I know for a fact that many of them are fake. Sorry, guys. The big companies are being assholes. They are required by law to post all open positions and take in people for interviews in some countries, but they have really writen some of the positions with specific employees already in mind. It's a frickin' scam. I know IBM did it, I know the ISPs sometimes do it (and enjoy temps they can easily shed, rather than actual employees).
To hell with all that! No boss hanging over me now, and I can sleep till noon before I code away/spit out some hawt CSS/fix somebody's printer. Not getting rich yet, but I have some backup money until luck turns.