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Tech Sector Slow To Hire
Iftekhar25 writes "The NY Times is running an article about soaring unemployment rates for IT in the US (6 percent) despite a tech sector that is thirsting for engineering talent. Quoting: 'The chief hurdles to more robust technology hiring appear to be increasing automation and the addition of highly skilled labor overseas. The result is a mismatch of skill levels here at home: not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms, and too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at lower cost. That's a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers, whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.'"
IT is not engineering. The two fields are not analogous
Go ahead guys.
My sincerest wishes to those unemployed, but 6 percent considered soaring?
Sure, it's not great but it's perhaps not as terrible a crisis as newspapers would like to make out; considering how every section of the economy is impacted right now I would read too much into it.
not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms,
Complete bullshit.
and too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at lower cost
This is 100% true.
And don't forget this reason I am adding:
Too few people willing to work heroic hours for non-heroic pay.
"not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms" ...
who are willing to work for $20,000 a year.
Oh no, there are not enough highly skilled engineers available to depress wages even further. The CEO will starve if he can't drop the payroll enough.
Nullius in verba
The numbers being spread around for unemployment are quite unsettling to me. I can only hope things turn around enough to get a decent starting job this spring. Several of my friends could not find internships this past summer due to companies decreasing the amount of students they hire. I myself could only get several odd jobs scraped together to give me a reasonable income for the summer.
...then complain about a lack of "qualified" candidates.
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Especially since the national average is over 9% currently. Seems to me a more accurate story would be "Tech sector hasn't recovered to previous levels, but has much lower unemployment than many other areas."
The result is a mismatch of skill levels here at home: not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms, and too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at lower cost. That's a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers, whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.'"
Then train them or make it a legal requirement to hire & train them. It's one thing to complain about regular people having to settle with less, why can't a business be made to do the same?
Reads like an justification for offshoring if you'd ask me.
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All we have to do is get rid of the H1B bastards and BOOM instant high tech employment.
Let's get going - time for a "change"
I'd really like to see someone who can solve trivial problems in java. Maybe our internal recruitment team just sucks, but I just did yet another interview with a candidate who got stuck for almost 3 minutes trying to figure out why eclipse was complaining about their HashMap<String>.
Where are the qualified candidates!
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I prefer the 6% unemployment rate in my industry compared to the unemployment rate in my sisters field of expertise (architectural engineering), IIRC it is above 20%.
Times are good:
not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms
Times are bad:
not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms
It's starting to sound like a thin excuse to hire cheap. Not that it didn't sound like one before.
Like the Helpdesk position I read once that wanted someone with Java, C++ experience and the ability to write his own support tools.
Anecdotally at least, it seems there are plenty of tech job postings out there, especially in California (where I don't live), and especially in software. It may be front-loaded, that is heavy on the posting/recruiting end and light on the actual offer/hiring end of the pipeline, which could help explain the unemployment numbers. It may also be that like other industries, larger established companies have had layoffs. But plenty of companies (small or innovative firms) appear to be hiring like mad. Either way, the current job market in tech looks to me to be good for those actively seeking work or a promotion. As usual, I expect innovation in various sectors (not just so-called "tech") to be a major driving force of any serious turnaround.
This report in NY times looks like it is somehow tied to the recent Bill sponsored by Chuck Schumer.
The bill pays for the border security with Mexico by slapping a hefty fee on Indian outsourcing companies.
http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dc/2010/08/schumer-bill-sends-reinforceme.html
I am not surprised this news came around this time.
So, let's do some logic here.
U.S.A. citizens get their training at U.S.A. universities.
Countries around the world send their citizens to U.S.A. universities.
Skill mismatch? Where do the foreign folks get their unique skills? Should the U.S.A. be sending folks abroad to universities?
Is the unique skill "low cost"? Are businesses finding it totally unacceptable to train their employees?
Does this mean employees are throwaway after five years since "the next big thing" has come out and it did not exist when they went to school?
when you take more and more of the cash companies make from them to fund an ever-expanding state and "bail-outs" (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20014563-38.html) ... *of course* it gets harder for companies to be able to afford to hire people and thus create more jobs. No sh-t. Let companies keep more of what they earn and they'll feel more comfortable hiring people, it's that simple. But all those billions floating around, it's just too tempting for governments to not want more of it.
If it costs as much to offshore it or temp it as much as it does to do it properly, those ways of "hiring" might not look so good as a loophole.
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Here in California, the Republican party decided to run 2 fine tech CEOs for Governor and Senate.
There's Meg "Buy the governorship now" Whitman who wants to replace you with 500,000 new H-1Bs this year, and every year.
There's Carly "Fired from HP" Fiornia who wants to offshore your job.
Where are the qualified candidates!
They're already employed and fairly happy. If you want to get them to uproot and move to your company, your HR department is going to have to offer more than the standard "kinda above average" salary and "competitive" benefits.
What does the job posting look like? Is how it's worded attracting the wrong candidates?
When I was job hunting, I could always tell the "dog" jobs because they said nothing interesting about compensation besides (sometimes) "competitive pay and benefits".
That is what IDEs do to people ...
I write all my java in vim, and I never have useless complaints like yours.
I may venture so far out as to say it is remotely possible that even emacs sucks less than an IDE.
I see that a lot. There needs to be a differentiation between "experience" and "drawing a paycheck".
If you get hired by a company to drop workstation images onto workstation hardware ... and you do it for 10 years ... do you have 10 years of experience working with those OS's?
No. You have 1 week experience ... repeated 520 times (not counting vacations).
You have 10 years of drawing a paycheck.
That's why I prefer to test candidates myself.
This was probably actually a Remedy developer position.
" whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry"
Why? I've been laid off before. Worked for a company that went out of business too. Why do your skills have to start fading when you get laid off? To me, that's the perfect time to pick up NEW skills. You still have a computer, I presume. Even if you don't still have an internet connection at home, what self-respecting nerd can't get access to the latest tech in their field? Besides, learning Java, Python, Ruby, etc. is FREE.Setting up a bunch of virtual machines and playing around with network configs is FREE. Setting up MySQL, PostgreSQL, and even MS-SQL is FREE. Learning BGP is FREE. MIT OpenCourseWare is FREE.
If you can't get re-hired right away, there's no reason you can't stay current and even improve your skill set with all your new found FREE time.
Of course, last time I was laid off, I just started consulting while looking for a job. After three months of 40+ hr billable weeks and no end in sight I asked my wife if she minded that I stopped looking for full-time W2 employment. She doesn't mind. That was four years ago.
...for already being beholden to foreign offshoring interests?
I would hope that they say "...and we recognize the Senator from India, Carly Fiorina"
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From TFA: "We are firing up our college recruiting program, enduring all manner of humiliation to try to fill these jobs," said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, an online brokerage agency for buying and selling homes that is based in Seattle and San Francisco." (emphasis mine)
I call bullshit. Complete & utter bullshit. The guy claims he can't find qualified people in those 2 towns? Suuuure you can't pal. The clincher here is the "enduring...humilation" part. I don't even know what to say to that. WTF is he even talking about? Maybe he is forced to whore himself out, blowing anyone he can to get enough cash to score the crack that keeps him so high & delusional that he actually believes his own bullshit. Did I mention he is full of shit? Amazing.
hey're already employed and fairly happy. If you want to get them to uproot and move to your company, your HR department is going to have to offer more than the standard "kinda above average" salary and "competitive" benefits.
Not necessarily sure about the "fairly happy". It may also be that in an insecure economy, the devil you know (and have experience with that might save you from a layoff) is better than the devil you don't. Either way, your solution is correct - a risk premium in salary or benefits are in order.
That is all.
Increasingly, the only world for techs is run, owned, staffed, and generally populated by techs.
Techs can't be content with a government run by non-techs. They get miffed when patents are granted for things like "clicking on the icon", but non-tech patent clerks grant such patents any way. They get miffed when laws are drafted against breaking rot-13 encryption, even though a nine-year-old can do it, but it happens anyway because non-techs draft and pass the legislation. They get miffed when Governors O.K. networked electronic voting in their states but Governors do it anyway because they have no idea what a transistor is or what security really means. So techs aren't content unless their government is all-tech.
Similarly, techs get miffed when they are asked to be the nervous system of the entire company and are paid just a little more than the janitor. They would have to work in a company entirely owned by techs to get the treatment and compensation they feel they deserve. They get miffed when their coworkers think they're supposed to crawl out of the network closet and fix a pencil sharpener or change a toner cartridge, but the only time that doesn't happen is when all the coworkers are techs, too. And they get miffed when in society in general things go according to what football players and retired military officers want and never the way techs want, so techs get to be the whipping posts of the rest of the population and are never glorified, always misunderstood, and never respected or wanted around by the more glamorous members; but the only way that would change would be if all the members of the population were techs.
So who cares if you can't get a fucking job? Learn how to make your own money, since you're so god-damned smart!!! :)
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
I can picture that at a small company. Sometimes it's a budget stretch to hire two different people for those roles. E.g., you have some highly technical, low volume product with a very small number of support calls, you don't need to fund a full support staff, and in fact, maybe you want the one guy doing this to do some IT work for you too. You could pay the right, capable person 1.5-2x a normal salary for simple helpdesk, and still save money.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
It's one thing to be able to do that, it's another to have tons of people able to do that. Sounds like you would have no problem either way.
No thank you, but some stability is all that is asked, for the majority.
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Software development is more about problem solving and communication skills than actually writing code. These abilities don't atrophy nearly so fast. A solid developer can pick up whatever technologies are needed for jumping into an existing problem space with little effort and apply their problem solving skills.
That's pretty much in line with my thinking: the 6% unemployment number is complete BS, because those 6% appear to be unemployable. We're still counting too many dot com bubblers as 'in' our field.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Or make it harder to not hire, and in ways that are not temporary. You seem to want to have companies have the perfect conditions before they will hire, yet have individuals have to take less than perfect conditions.
You're only making a case for the government to pursue harder. Want them not to? Hire more US citizens in the US, full-time.
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That's so true. I was offered an otherwise decent job a few months ago, except it paid ~20-25k/year less than the about equally decent job I'm working. Sorry, no.
One of my friends once said to an employer while negotiating salary something to the effect of, "Look, money isn't everything, but the difference between what you're willing to pay me and what they're willing to pay me is the price of my car."
I put it more delicately as I'm negotiating, but I take the basic concept to heart.
You're Mark Hurd.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
I saw a job posting that required 10 years experience with a program that had only existed for 6 years.
Like the Helpdesk position I read once that wanted someone with Java, C++ experience and the ability to write his own support tools.
That's not a helpdesk position.
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Companies aren't hiring because of taxes??
Let me guess - you are retarded enough to vote Republican even after they just finished driving the country in to a very deep ditch.
Companies aren't hiring because they don't have enough demand for their products. Do you really think that a company is going to hire someone just because they got their taxes cut? That type of shady logic may make sense to a lobotomized 'conservative' but back in the real world (where I work) companies only people because they have some need for their labor.
Then again, considering that your incredibly stupid statement actually resonates with many Americans, it's possible that companies are having trouble finding and hiring intelligent employees.
Incidentally, how much hosting/colo is being offshored from Europe/US? I'd think that power reliability in India and censorship in China would hamper that, but it wouldn't be the first time I underestimated management stupidity..
It's fine for a company to want and get perfect conditions, but individuals are asked to take less than perfect jobs.
That's the problem to solve, and not in the favor of business.
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Had a friend who had a long stint of unemployment. A large part of the problem was companies that use recruiters, and have morons write the job requirements. There were so many jobs that when you filtered through the bullshit, he probably could do. However he'd have to lie about his qualifications to get them, and he won't do that. Shit like "Must have 7 years experience in Ruby, Java, Perl, PHP, and MySQL." Ok so they are looking for a web app and they don't know what they want it in. Fine, he can do that, he's a real programmer in that he can learn new languages. He also has done all those. However he can't truthfully say 7 years of Ruby experience. He's got 15 years of Perl experience, but only 1 of Ruby. Doesn't mean he's bad at Ruby, just that he didn't see the need to use it till recently. However he gets filtered since he doesn't "meet the requirements" and instead they get the liar types who don't know what they are talking about.
That was actually something that the people at the job he did get commented on. He had very little Ruby experience, but generates code faster and of much higher quality than the "Ruby people." They were amazed and he had to explain that he'd done all this before, the specific language isn't really relevant.
So if you want good candidates, make sure the description is written by someone who knows what the fuck they are talking about, and that what it asks for is reasonable. Reason is a good candidate is probably also someone who's honest and thus won't lie on the app just to get in the door. Figure out what you actually need, and put down also what you'd like as optional and go with that.
No "10 years of experience with every single web related language," kind of shit. Instead something like "Someone with 5+ years of software development experience, at least some of it with web programming. Experience in one or more of the following a plus: Perl, PHP, Ruby, etc." Something that tells people what the job actually is, and gives them an idea what you want.
the devil you know (and have experience with that might save you from a layoff) is better than the devil you don't. Either way, your solution is correct - a risk premium in salary or benefits are in order.
Or, if they're coasties, their house is (financially) underwater and to switch jobs they'd have to move and declare bankruptcy. I've heard this is an issue, folks whom rent can move, and are making bank, folks with houses can't move and are stuck. Even worse for security clearance type jobs where bankruptcy equals no clearance.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Judging by the candidates I've interviewed in the past few months, I'd say this is entirely correct.
Sun's PSARC 2002/013(sun4m EOL) is why I run an IBM RS/6000 today.
Is that a RowerPC system?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
All we have to do is get rid of the H1B bastards and BOOM instant high tech employment.
I love how Slashdot is dominated by liberal sentiments until it comes to our jobs, then it's 100% anti-immigration, dominated with rhetoric that sounds like theminute men. It's sad that you were modded insightful instead of troll.
:) That's my happy dream.
What we actually need is more immigration, and more emigration, so we can all get to know each other and realize that we're all human brothers and sisters and won't want to kill each other for reading one book or another, and can be happy when someone else gets a job instead of calling them bastards.
Qxe4
H1Bs are not offshore outsourcing, they are importing skilled workers. If you fire them all, you'll replace them with people who live and work in another country and you won't get any benefit from them paying taxes to the same government as you.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Oh poor baby, maybe if you were worth hiring, you'd be hired. The H1B's are there because you are not worth hiring at any price, so they might as well save some money and hire for cheap.
If your friend can't tailor a resume for an opening, taking into account any apparent lack of understanding on the part of HR, your friend may need a wake-up call.
Lying on the app is one thing, willingness to make up for someone else's stupidity because you're hungry is another.
But it seems to have gone up with unemployment generally going up. So it isn't anything special, it is just more of the same. Also as far as I can see, UE has stabilized. That isn't what we want, we want it going down, but it cannot be said to be "soaring" when it is staying the same.
Finally I have to question that chart more than a little bit, given the extremely high rate for general unemployment it is reporting. All over the net I see people reporting the "real" unemployment rate, always something much higher than the official one. The two things they have in common:
1) They don't have a good source for this. It is always either just unsourced, or through various dubious sources and "corrections" to the official rate applied.
2) They are all nutty doomsayers who cry about how fucked we are and how this is even worse than the great depression.
To me, the original article just sounds like more doom and gloom trying to make things sound worse than they really are. I hate this shit since so much of our economy is based on perception. That means the doomsayers are actually working to make things worse. No small part of what is needed right now is for individuals and companies to get less fearful and start returning to normal.
That's pretty much in line with my thinking: the 6% unemployment number is complete BS, because those 6% appear to be unemployable. We're still counting too many dot com bubblers as 'in' our field.
While there might be some justification, the large part is the set of companies that are being allowed to be too picky for their own good.
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My employer is hiring, both full-time and contractor. My previous employer was hiring as well. In neither case could we get qualified candidates.
Thats because HR is requiring 10 years of experience with winders 2008 server, so by definition the only resumes that make it thru the HR filtration plant are liars / con men / inside-referrals.
Whenever I see someone say that "they can't get qualified people" it's always for these reasons:
Unreasonable qualifications as the parent stated or incompetent HR. And it's not just tech skills, it's also for subjective reasons too; such as, "they wouldn't fit in" or some nonsense.
Here's an example that I over heard fixing a friend's computer who lives with an HR person that works at home. They were on a conference call and it was on speaker phone. One of the HR people came on to talk about a candidate. The candidate by her own admission had an impressive resume - all the skills, education and experience required by the job. Anyway, this person commented that when the candidate came in the room "he sucked the air out of the room" and he wouldn't be good for the company.
Now, was it brought up that the guy could have been a bit nervous because he was unemployed for several months? Nope. He was passed over because the HR person didn't think she was allowed to have enough air.
You want qualified candidates? Bypass HR.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
First, 6% unemployment is not high at all. The "sweet spot" is about 5%. Any lower and it becomes too hard to find people.
Second, all this talk about "cutting edge" technology is a lot of bullshit. I haven't seen anything that I would really consider "cutting edge" technology for at least a decade. Whatever they are calling "cutting edge" can be quickly grasped by all but the most stupid engineers.
Personally, I think this complaint about a lack of people with the right skills is just an excuse used by mid-level managers and VP's to cover up the fact that they can't get things accomplished.
Proverbs 21:19
Bang on. That's why smart companies like Google run interviews that test problem-solving skills rather than some particular api.
That said, here is some advice for programmer members of the 6%: in terms of hireability, you really can't go wrong learning Spring inside and out. It's staggering how many enterprises have deeply committed themselves to that particular framework.
...and who made you the sole arbiter that decision?
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That's EXACTLY what that blurb is stating, no beating around the bush. Economically speaking, company seeks labor at the cheapest rates possible. Offshoring is the cheapest in many situations.
And the article isn't justifying anything, just explaining a truth in the market place. If you had two white people living on the same block in Anytown, USA who had the same skillset and one asked for $30,000 and one asked for $35,000, you'd hire the cheaper one. If you want your elected official to do something about it, that's a completely different discussion.
If you aren't smarter than some tech in India, or can't justify why your job should stay right were it is, your job isn't safe. It doesn't suggest remedies, but if you read between the lines that if you don't take the political route, one good way to keep your job is to keep getting smarter. It's just the truth.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
This article is entirely based on the experience of one 49-year-old Latina woman who is having difficulty finding work. The article concludes:
The experience of Ms. Mann and others like her suggests that the technology industry may not be the savior of the American job market
Look, Ms. Mann might be awesome at her job, or she might not be very good. Maybe her experience tells us something about her work history, or maybe it tells us something about the software industry creating unfair barriers to entry for middle-aged hispanic women.
But you have to be kind of a lazy journalist to say that Ms. Mann's story can be extrapolated to describe the state of the US software industry. The only other industry source cited in the article was a hiring manager who said he still has to fight like hell and humiliate himself to get the candidates he wants.
And here's the money quote that explains to us how all domestic software jobs have been offshored.
"The programming language “C++ is now an international language,” she said. “If that’s all you know, then you’re competing with people in India or China who will do the work for less.”
Uh, yes. I do see a lot of C++ work being offshored. A lot of COBOL and Fortran work as well. The author of this article doesn't seem to be aware that these are not exactly areas of growth in the software industry.
I'm trying to hire a programmer out of college. No particular skill set - just a programmer with BS in CS. Have posted on facebook marketplace, craigslist, 10 very large universities, a few other places. Not a single qualified resume. We aren't picky. They clearly aren't looking very hard. It's been a month. We need someone bad. It sucks.
And yes, I realize that's a contradiction in terms. They are people who more or less want to be a dictator's kid. They want special privileges for them. The government should stay out of their lives, but should keep religious people from bothering them. The government should lower (or eliminate) taxes, but should provide social support for when they are unemployed. They should have the freedom to do whatever they want, but companies should be forced to hire them and not allowed to fire them. They should be allowed to hack in to someone's system if that person didn't secure it properly but nobody should be allowed to break in to their house.
More or less they want special treatment. They want whats best for themselves, and screw other people.
So none of this is a surprise. When it is immigrants coming from Mexico to work in a field they don't, then those people should be welcomed with open arms, regardless of how they got here. When it is immigrants coming from India to work in a field they do, then those people should be barred, even though they are here legally.
6% seems incredibly low considering the number of people in this discipline that managed to get a degree without actually being able to do anything useful or have anything to offer a company. I would love to see a 20% unemployment rate. Then the qualified employees can actually do what they are hired to do, instead of spending their first 6 months on the job cleaning up the messes that the previous 6 incompetent people mucked up. Whats the McDonalds equivalent IT job?
If they were still in the field seven years after the dot-com bubble burst and were qualified enough to stay employed in the field during that time, how can you call them "dot com bubblers"? I am seeing many good resumes (i.e., worth talking to, good employment history) for every position I can post (which are few and far between). Either you're relying on your HR department to do too much work for you (resulting in over-filtering), or you're being way too picky.
That is all.
My impression of why tech companies cannot fill IT jobs:
12 months ago: "We're sorry, we're looking for exactly 3 years of PHP and 2 years of JSP. You only have 2.5 years of PHP."
9 months ago: "We think you're great and you aced the interview, but we couldn't secure the corporate funding needed to expand our team. Sorry."
7 months ago: "We're sorry, but even though you're highly experienced, have great references, are very skilled in every area the job calls for, demonstrated excellent competency, and are willing to work for the entry-level pay, we feel you're overqualified for this position."
4 months ago: "The client is a super-seekret highly sensitive government contract position for a critical national agency such as the Strategic Helium Reserve, which requires 12 weeks of background checks, so we can't tell you about the pay, the benefits, the location, the employer, or the job duties, but we'll be happy to take your resume, add it to the pile, and then refuse to speak to you ever again."
2 months ago: "Even though you've spent many years working with a very wide variety of extremely similar [databases|technologies|libraries], those aren't exactly the same as our own obscure archaic [database|technology|library], which only 2 people in the world know how to use anyway. We've spent 24 months trying to fill this position so we feel it's important to find an applicant whose skills are a good fit."
Today: "Even though you're a perfect fit for the position in every way, we're somewhat concerned that you've been out of work for a year and feel your skills may be out of date, even though the technologies involved have not changed at all during that time. We'll also say the same thing about when we first saw your resume 10 months ago, because we don't have a clear idea of how time works."
“There’s been this assumption that there’s a global hierarchy of work, that all the high-end service work, knowledge work, R.&D. work would stay in U.S., and that all the lower-end work would be transferred to emerging markets,” said Hal Salzman, a public policy professor at Rutgers and a senior faculty fellow at Heldrich Center for Workforce Development
IT, including software development and engineering is a commodity. It can be done anywhere in the World and when you consider that there are over 7 Billion people on Earth with many of their governments paying for their educations in tech, finding a few million to do that work really cheap isn't that hard.
Humanity is turning itself into a cheap commodity.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Then by all means take the political route and favor our own for once.
Answer the question: why businesses can demand perfection while individuals cannot?
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Sure, there are companies out there doing it right or at least trying, but there are many who are looking to
1. Replace experienced workers with inexperienced ones at half to 2/3rds salary.
2.Hire architects to design and document complex systems and then hire the equivalent of janitors to do maintenance and upgrade work. Eventually the center cannot hold and you end up with a complex nest of band aids and workarounds worthy only of submission to TDWTF.
3.Replace creative thinking, problem solving and innovation with documentation of procedure whereby routine tasks are accomplished by following rote procedures and recipes that a trained monkey can follow, but which don't really address all the real world failure points in the process or how to even detect them much less correct them. Worse yet, since policy is to follow the procedure, updating said procedure is usually next to impossible to get approved.
Most of this comes from a fundamental mistrust and misunderstanding of the value and role of IT within an organization. IT as a whole is viewed as a sausage grinder into which many companies pour their most critical business problems and hope that what comes out is a solution everyone can stomach. IT doesn't fix business problems, it fixes Information and automation problems. If you make poor decisions and ask IT to implement them, and the whole thing goes up in flames it doesn't mean IT failed you and many companies don't seem to grasp that.
H1B is certainly part of the problem but it goes much deeper...
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/news-by-industry/jobs/IBM-Accenture-EDS-moving-more-jobs-to-offshore-locations/articleshow/6221409.cms
Oh come on! Do you think Western companies don't send all the jobs abroad because deep down they are nice people?
They don't do it because many of them can't be offshored! Lord knows they've tried...
I don't know when it crept into our industry, but damn if there aren't too many people who don't think they need to work to their fullest, or even half that amount. Worse, quite a few are more than willing to invoke their "minority" position to keep any discipline at bay. We have our off shore contingent and they are very good at what they do, some surprising me with their expertise in areas I wish I was better at. I work for a very good company and they do try to their best in keeping us up to date and feeling valued. However something was lost in this industry, perhaps a reaction to seeing jobs going to off shore. In some ways its like watching petulant children.
Throw in those with expertise who refuse jobs because the pay is below their self perceived value.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.
Huh, that doesn't seem to jive with my experience. Of course, I stayed away from the framework of the week and learned C in college. Oh look, it's still relevant.
I can completely understand if you feel that the H1-B policy is not a good one for at least some segments of the US. However, the individuals who found jobs under this policy have done nothing wrong to you personally, or to the US as a nation. They arrived legally, pay taxes (in fact, they even pay social security taxes that they cannot benefit from, because they must leave the country if they lose their jobs) without receiving any representation, and spend a good chunk of their income in the US. At the top end, these are the sharpest minds in the world that we need to attract and keep if we want to remain relevant in R&D.
So where do you get the gall to call them names?
Then start playing atomic-level pool with the Third World, or getting them to wipe themselves out?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Sorry but you are wrong. I quit dealing with IBM and heavy H1B users like them because the angle is hire domestic skilled labor to train cheap barely skilled or unskilled H1Bs that have been hired and passed off as having skills.
I have my pick of places to work I just don't train H1B people anymore. I make less but I don't have to clean up huge messes anymore.
I assume many of the dot com bubblers got bought up by entities like Oracle/HP, and only now that those companies are executing rounds of layoffs are they really hitting the market.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Anon, but I don't care.
Have posted on facebook marketplace, craigslist, 10 very large universities, a few other places. Not a single qualified resume. We aren't picky.
Something you're doing is not getting the results you want. Mind you, this is slashdot, not "HR consulting".
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Sometimes the money is important, but sometimes it's the other things. I recently turned down an approach from a large tech firm because moving to London would be a deal breaker for me. The only way I'd consider working in London would be if you payed me 7 or more figures, and I could make enough to retire somewhere that isn't such a hellhole after 1-2 years. Working freelance, I get interesting projects, I get to define my own schedule, I get to slack off and sit in the park with a book when it's sunny, or sit with a nice view of the sea when I am working, and as long as I don't miss deadlines my customers are happy. I've turned down a few (unsolicited) job offers recently that would have increased my income by a factor of 2-3 because the cost of living decrease would not be worth it. A factor of 10 increase might change my mind, but there aren't many companies that could afford that and the ones that could probably employ people who would explain to them why it would be a bad use of their resources.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That is probably your problem right there. I've told this story a number of times and I'll tell it more I'm sure:
Had a friend who was out of work for a long time. Smart guy, very competent developer. However he could not get a job. Large part of the reason was most of the jobs used recruiters. These people were looking for liars. The questions they asked and the requirements they used were so stupid, no good person could honestly answer as to having what they wanted. My friend, being such a person, wouldn't lie just to get in the door and so never got an interview.
So from what I can tell, these people are near useless. They pretty much guarantee you get nothing but the liar types who will just change their application to meet whatever qualifications you want.
You need to do hiring yourself, no recruiters in the middle, to get good people.
So both manufacturing and high tech are being pushed offshore by companies seeking sub-minimum-wage workers. Then you have a financial industry focused on finding new ways to screw customers and on high stakes gambling with other peoples' money. The gambling gets big bonuses for the gamblers because it only depends on the volume of bets and not on whether the bank can cover them if they lose.
For about two decades after World War II, we had ups and downs, but a family could have a pretty good life with only one income. Tech people were in charge of tech companies, labor unions were strong, and a company's responsibility in its community was part of the social fabric. Now we have Dilbert's boss type managers running tech companies, labor unions are down to a small part of the workforce, and financial traders could care less about who they hurt as they manipulate companies.
No wonder we have an economic mess.
Slow to hire? I know a number of companies that still can't find people. It's all about your skillset right now. If you're in the Carolinas and know VMware and/or Storage and/or Cisco Data Center Networking you need to email me. I need people ASAP.
A solid developer can pick up whatever technologies are needed for jumping into an existing problem space with little effort and apply their problem solving skills.
When they want to. I've seen quite a few old-timers that either resist to learn new technology, or worse, retrod antique technology that they're familiar with. Though, I'd argue that what these companies say is actually true: for every 1 good software engineer there's around 10 mediocre ones. The mediocre kind that: copy paste internet forum code, don't read documentation, don't follow specifications, and "make it not crash" as opposed to "make it work correctly".
If the job could have been outsourced as you suggest it would have been sent overseas already. The reason HB1s were hired in the first place is because we needed someone onsite, here in the US. So no, if you fire them all they will be replaced with domestic workers.
IBM has changed their ways a little bit. Friend of mine was a 20 year project manager(application development) with them and got her walking papers last year. The offer was: relocate to Russia or a myriad of former Soviet states(unpaid relocation btw) and you can keep your job at a steep pay cut, or take this severance package and go away.
These were application forms (electronic) to fill out. You had to put "years of experience" inf or each language and various ones had requirements. Morons had written the app basically.
Also in the event of a statement like that you could also read it as 7 years working with ALL those languages, which is probably what the company, or at least the recruiter, though they wanted. You can have a year's experience in Java that is also a year's experience in Ruby if you use both for projects.
It is sad, IBM used to be much more ethical but now
"anything to make a buck"
has decayed to
"anything to make a shareholder buck"
I have been IBM free for several years now and I am glad to stay that way. There are better clients and opportunities even in this tough market.
The ongoing humor is getting these every week now...
"IBM Opportunity for IT Infrastructure Architect - GTS-xxxxxxx"
Precisely. I've always spent more time learning the business of who I'm working for than the tech, anyway. Even in my 40s, I can go from a standstill to reasonably productive (though maybe not the most efficient way) with a new tech in a week or two at most. Learning the reasons and whys and hows of the problems we're solving always took more time than the technology part ever did.
Why is there an H1B program at all right now? In this economy? Send them all back to where they came from and they can build up their own shitty countries instead of leaching off ours.
Or at least they could speak english at work and take a fucking shower every now and then. Ever enter a conference room just vacated by 10 or 12 Indians? What a stench.
Companies will hire less qualified indians because they cost less and can be pushed around. So the quarterly profit is higher and whoever cut Americans loose gets a nice big bonus for saving the company money. great work.
IBM ethical? The company whose subsidiary marketed their census machines' abilities to better track undesirables to Nazi Germany?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
That's a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers, whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.
The only skills that depreciate that quickly are ones that any competent programmer can pick up very quickly and with very little effort. The important skills are the ones that take years to acquire, and those don't go out of date just because Magic Web Framework 3.0 gets released.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
I didn't know that but I can say I am not surprised.
They don't seem to be on a path to improving in any case.
I'm a recent graduate with only two years experience, and despite phenomenal performance while in college, even getting an interview is a rare event. After losing my job, I faced over a year of unemployment despite applying for hundreds of positions, and only got my current job (web programming for near minimum wage) because I offered to do it for *free* for a local college, and they decided to hire me, instead. Even then, it's hardly steady work. If they don't have any projects, I don't have anything to do, and I'm continuing the application grind.
The whole "experience" thing is the real killer. I recently went through a few rounds of interviews at a startup for an *internship*, and despite telling me that they were impressed through the entire process, they ended up going with someone with more experience, for a no-experience-required internship, mind you.
I believe that as a programmer we should start a Union to try and save our jobs here in the U.S.
A unified body that has some say in government, not to send out jobs oversees.
How the bloody fuck does a skill deprecate? Maybe a tiny portion of what I learned 10 years ago isn't relevant any longer, but I was just quoting a bit of info about AS/400 stuff I learned years ago with a management type on how to deal with their database group. I really have no idea what a skill is anymore if there is any way to make that statement make any sense.
Here, staff is kept at the barest minimum. People are only hired when absolutely necessary and, even then, only when they pass a bunch of arbitrary filters. The filters don't work well and block lot of good people, but if they are tight enough, the chances of someone slipping through that would need to be trained is minimized.
Offshore, they hire the new grads, the generalists, and the career changers. They often need training but they are cheaper so that's OK.
Here, they can never find enough qualified people because the requirements are too restrictive and new people are not allowed into the pipeline. Paradoxically, layoffs reduce the pool because anyone who is unable to find a new job in a short time is now considered unqualified.
Offshore, the pool of qualified engineers is growing by leaps and bounds as people train up and get experience doing real work.
Here, expertise is shed in a macabre game of musical chairs where anyone caught without a job at the wrong time is ejected as a result of a disqualifying "gap".
Eventually, the only source for candidates to fill those "high level" jobs will legitimately be off shore. But it may not matter if the only thing left here is a sales office for an entirely foreign company.
"whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry."
Really ... what kind of Depends wearing over-cologned 'expert' writes something like this ?
If I quit my job, and work on an open source project, for 5 years, non-stop, all day, every day ... do my skills
continue to depreciate ?
For all those poor, high tech companies out there, who are just having such a hard time hiring a qualified employee ... go f yourself.
Hire someone and let them work, or don't. This isn't an episode of the office, it's reality.
I would also like to see an end to the H1B program but not in the same spirit. I say give them green cards so they can't be used as indentured servants. Some companies may play by the rules there, but many do not and use the power to deport H1B's just by firing them to force them into long hours for substandard pay.
You *did* notice the error in "HashMap", right? I might be idiot enough to write that, if I'm not paying attention, but I can figure out what's wrong with that without outside help, too.
But limiting it "cutting-edge technology" gets you the younger workers who work cheaper.
The job situation in I.T. has nothing to do with talent, much like manufacturing has nothing to do with American Unions.
Pure and simple, they want slave labourers that live in dormitories and once they get old you throw them in the oven.
We have the slave labor camps and dormitories, we just don't have the ovens yet back in vogue.
The surf sector, I mean the service sector economy is a direct goal of this.
Do you people honestly believe in any of the people you vote for? Do you think congress is stupid?
Quite to the contrary, congress and the people who pull their strings know exactly what would happen if you took away manufacturing.
It was planned. It will continue...and they won't stop till everyone is living in a dormitory in public housing and you have nothing left.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
CEO's using H1B and outsourcing are traitors
They should be arrested, tried and executed for their treason.
headhunters / recruiters like to mess with the CV some even push people in to job they are not fit from / don't have the skills for.
I have had recruiters put be on the job just to have the job You have alot of effort but you don't have the skills to do this job and that was for a job that not a IT job and had little to do IT at all but some how a recruiter took a IT CV and landed on this job.
http://www.nearbuysystems.com/jobs.html
Come on NYT, I've had positions open for five months now.
what about skills that people have not used for years but they sill have it on the resume? or stuff they know about but have not see it used it in a office?
Something I put together: http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
I predict we'll see continually increasing unemployment (short of massive government intervention in make-work ways). To cope with massive unemployment, we need a new economic paradigm (some mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, and improved local subsistence in stronger face-to-face communities).
Frankly, as programmer who's been working with computers for 30 years or so, I can confidently say that the business world would have much software if there was a lot less paid business app developers (who seem mostly to make work for each other). :-)
How many basic accounting packages do we really need? You write a modular one in Lisp or Smalltalk, and you are good to go for the entire globe. Lisp plus some libraries under version control basically is your accounting package. If you need something fancy, you write a module to do it and load it in dynamically. And since the authors get abstraction, and also are just great developers, the system is designed to be easily expandable... There can be a 1000X difference in programmer productivity, not even including negative productivity... A handful of poor programmers pushes everyone towards dumbed down tools and just creates lots of work maintaining poorly thought out systems.
Note, that you may well want a domain specific language written in Lisp, or domain specific classes written and accessed in Smalltalk for non-programmers to use, but essentially, that is still just Lisp and Smalltalk. See:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1069786
""Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." - Philip Greenspun"
Still, I think everyone should know something about programming, just to be an informed citizen, and programming is fun, and people should have choices, and sometimes new breakthrough stuff comes from diverse experiments, and there is a lot of very useful programming everyone can do in areas of educational simulation, scientific modeling, and such. I'm all for everyone coding. I'm all for a diversity of approaches.
But the fact is, I have not seen that much stuff that is better than Lisp and Smalltalk (OK, maybe with C or Forth translated from Lisp and Smalltalk for device drivers... :-) Really, whatever one can say about the wonders of almost any language, you can just write in Lisp and translate to those languages (and build tools to do debugging). And those are old, old languages. But they are great languages (and environments) that can make people far more productive, and they have been able to do that for decades. Now we have stuff like Eclipse, that lets people create boiler plate Java code even faster -- but why do you really want to pollute the universe with endless boilerplate code that someone has to comb through looking for gotchas? So, more makework...
Note, by Lisp I mean a whole family of related programming languages that have easily adopted new paradigms... And by Smalltalk, I mean, well Smalltalk. :-) And if 90% of programmers can't get Lisp syntax, well, back to my first point, the word would be better off without them doing business development. Note: you obviously want programmers who can both code and get the human and social side of things, so again, winnow programmer employment further and you are better off with less work being made for each other. Less code written is less code that needs to be maintained, tested, or debugged.
Instead, we have Java and C# as coding for those who can't get abstractions... But it becomes a standard everyone is stuck programming in, as a leveler. Just silly, really, but it bulks up employment numbers
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"If you fire them all, you'll replace them with people who live and work in another country"
Or maybe you can hire back those "encouraged" to quit to bring in H1B workers.
In my case a new VP from Accenture back in 2007 and declared she was going to remove at least 3 S/W developer positions. Said it would only occur through attrition. But her idea of attrition was to bad mouth work done by current employees. How do you respond when you're told your work is not acceptable because it is "not secure since it uses SQL"?
Ended up she didn't remove the positions, just the developers. After two left she brought in students on H1B visas. Now I find she's a general member of CRITO at UC Irvine.
Coincidence ya think?
Your problem is that you are looking for competencies in specific technologies that may or may not be obsolete in 2-3 years.
I've been in IT for over a decade and I have a CS degree (and a background in EE). I understand the very fundamentals of this entire business, right down to machine code and registers - my education gives me an in-depth knowledge of all that is IT. I was educated to build IT products, but I chose to integrate/install/admin IT products - it's what I like to do.
During the course of my work, I've been exposed to lots of technologies that have come and gone - everything from Microsoft domains, UNIX, Netware, Ethernet, Token Ring, EMC SANs, Cisco routers and firewalls and a whole host of acronyms to lengthy to list here.
I deployed VMware's ESXi hypervisor and a bunch of hosts in a weekend having never touched the stuff in my life prior. How? I have the capability to learn new things because of my education coupled with my many years in this business.
The moral of this post is the following:
Get well educated IT help and stop worrying about the technology du jour. Talented IT people can learn anything you throw at them. The trick is finding people who are capable of learning on their own.
I feel your pain; working short-handed is never fun. Good luck finding the talent - it's out there.
-ted
Perfectly valid to have those there, but its best to have a "Skills" section on your resume. I only read the rest if I'm forced to via it not being there. Well, I read the cover letter too after I check for necessary skill set, or educational qualifications/experience.
In a well built resume I can check your skill set immediately, then read your cover letter to see if you're serious about the position at all and potentially get some background as to why you are interested, then cross check your education and your experience in more detail. The first look at education/experience is just a cursory glance to see if its in any way related to the position you are applying for. However a good skill section and a cover letter that details the reason you're interested in the position will usually qualify you for a quick phone call at the very least, even if the rest doesn't match up. Which gives YOU a chance to expand on how you acquired skills etc that do not line up with your education/work experience, or in the specific case you mention, how you have at least somewhat kept up your skills over the years.
I mean, 3 years of a CS Degree 10 years ago and not really having used much of it since professionally is fine for me if you're looking to get into a field that is CS oriented after all those years, but you need to have a good reason for not having used the degree and a good reason for me to believe that you have kept your skills at least somewhat brushed up so that I know you'll be up to speed again within a month or so.
Oh, and if anyone has actually read all of this, here's another free piece of advice that will help:
If I see reference names and telephone numbers printed on your resume, I will throw it in the garbage immediately regardless of other qualifications, the only exception being if I'm just grabbing a resume for a very low level position and I'm barely even reading the thing. Otherwise, in the garbage it goes. Someone may scream that I can't discriminate against someone for something so simple, but I can. If you're sending out resumes chances are you've sent out a lot, and a lot of copies of those folks names. I don't mind getting a call for a reference for someone at all, but if I get 10 in a week my patience and the quality of their review is going down very very fast. It shows a lack of respect for the person whom you have asked to put in a good word for you in getting another job - not a good thing.
If you absolutely must brag about your references from previous jobs put a little (Reference(s) Available) after the work experience as applicable, then include a references section with a "References available upon request" as the only item there. Don't follow this advice if its a job advert specifically asking for references of course, some HR girl/guy has been given instructions to get references at that point and may dump your resume if they're not there. Even then though its best to leave the resume as is and include the references on a separate paper.
"I'd really like to see someone who can solve trivial problems in java. Maybe our internal recruitment team just sucks, but I just did yet another interview with a candidate who got stuck for almost 3 minutes trying to figure out why eclipse was complaining about their HashMap."
I would be curious about whether you were hiring someone stating they had years of work experience, or fresh out of school?
It is my opinion that the employers goal is to get the most work out of an employee at the least cost.
The employees goal is to get the most reward for the least effort.
If the expectations for a career in IT is constant downward pressure on salary with simultaneous increases in workload, then the employee (or candidate) should persue Plan B :)
I did WebSphere (J2EE stuff) for six years. Now I have a nice 3day telecommute job, and kept my salary.
My colleagues that stayed in IT had the CTO announce huge outsourcing to IBM in the past few years, and people that retire or leave... are not being replaced.
Might be a good time for others to persue Plan B until the economics of being in IT (or development) improve....
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
I actually don't fault them that much for it; they knew their market and tried to maximize profit. But I couldn't resist. There is a wiki page on IBM and the Holocaust that goes into a little more detail.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Much as I am happy for anyone who gets a job, and much as I appreciate smart immigrants who love the US and want to become part of it,
it seems like a sovereign nation should represent the interests of the people who are native to it and who are paying taxes, over the interests of every person on Earth who wants money.
I like Joe Schmoe from Bangalore and I'm happy he is coming to the US (I'm very liberal) but it would be wildly incorrect to assume that other sovereign countries are not representing the interests of their own people, or that it is wrong for any country to do so.
For one thing what does 4+ years tell you about real world IT work? and IT does not help the tech schools and on line ones are looked down on. Why should a school that's more well known for it's football team be better then a tech school?
Why does 4+ years in a class room better then 2-4 years doing real work with real would setups and problems?
Why should someone go to a big 4 year school and take lot's of frillier (non IT / CS / TECH) courses to round out the 4 years vs a tech school that has more tech based class to take?
Some certs can be just as bad real world but they seem to be more on topic then a 4 year BS. But still you can Ace the test and still have no clue while the guy with 2-4 years doing IT can't as they are not good at taking testes and or what they see in real would work is far from what is on the test.
"In the software industry, the only programmers really worth their salt that I've ever met were those who had the drive to train themselves. If you don't happen to have a passion for it, then you aren't going to be motivated to do it on your own. Those who self-train do it because they hvae a passion for it, and that same passion makes them good, and hirable by companies."
That seems fair.
"When I hear candidates who whine that they should be trained by employers, they often turn out to be lazy and disinterested and not very good *no matter how much* training you give them (and hence bad money you throw at them)."
This I disagree with a bit. Sometimes a good potential candidate can really shine given mentorship. Maybe they are right out of school, and school may not have prepared them in things like design patterns, or being new, they have not been exposed to the application-type that their job will support. With a good mentor, they can be guided by someone that has 'been there, done that' and the rewards will be win-win for the new employee and the company.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Technically speaking, working 80pw for 5 earth years does equate to a 40hr person who did it in 10.
But most stuff pre 2003 is useless any way.
Yeah, Slashdot is a union shop as soon as they find out the foreigners can do the same work for less.
They claim they can't, but somehow the business who replaced them keeps on going, disproving once and for all that their neurotic self importance is not manifest in reality.
Get hands-on as best you can. If paid, great. If not, seriously consider being a non-paid intern at a reputable corporation, city, or county department.
Once you can demonstrate your work ethic, eagerness to learn, social skills and IT skills... then it is my opinion things will go well for you.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
It's your fuckin' country that is leeching talent off several countries worldwide with H1B program. You bastards are the ones who have leeched off India, China and Korea (among others) for decades now. Motherfucker.
You deserve to lose your job, you bastard. Hope you lose your current job too, and are eventually forced to move into a slum.
This article points out one thing: the income tax system in the USA is hurting the US economy, even more so with the ending of the 2003 tax cuts starting in 2011.
Why? Because with the second-highest corporate income tax rate in the developed world (only Japan has a higher rate), the payroll tax and taxes on capital gains and stock dividend payments, American companies are offshoring jobs, manufacturing facilities, and even corporate headquarters on a huge scale in order to legally reduce the income tax burden (why do you think American companies are sending so much production to Mexico and China and have corporate headquarters registered and often operating from Caribbean island nations like the Bahamas, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Nettherlands Antilles, and so forth).
This, in my humble opinion, is economic insanity. We should seriously pursue MASSIVE taxation reform on the scale of either the Steve Forbes flat income tax proposal (based on a book he wrote in 2005) or the even more radical FairTax proposal to replace the income tax entirely. Our current income tax system--no thanks to a MOUNTAIN of deductions and tax credits to support almost every Tom, Dick and Harry tax lobbying group out there--now costs over US$304 BILLION per year in compliance costs and not only drove jobs and manufacturing facilities offshore, but also may have driven nearly US$2 TRILLION into the illegal cash-only underground economy and circa US$14 TRILLION in American-owned liquid assets to offshore financial centers (many of them located in the Caribbean island nations I mentioned)--all in the name of keeping these assets out of the hands of IRS.
Fix our income tax system so it encourages American citizens and businesses to keep as much of the savings and captital investments in the USA, and the US economy will come roaring back to life in a matter of months.
I'm asking because .. I do, and let me tell you, it sucks. We've had open reqs for months now that we haven't been able to fill, and that's not due to lack of trying.
I recently read a comment from a (now) friend who was my manager years ago; "If I need a Sr. Engineer, I advertise for an Architect. If I need an engineer, I advertise for a senior".
I'm finding this to be completely true. I've interviewed people recently for Senior positions who can't pass the FizzBang test, never mind anything more complicated (and we don't start with fizzbang, it's usually a last resort during the interview), I'm not quite sure if their resumes are simply complete works of fiction or if someone has actually been paying them for some reason.
I almost am willing to theorize that the dot-bomb fallout isn't over, and that there are still many, many "engineers" and "developers" who have been incredibly over-employed for many years who now find themselves out of work. If I were looking for Jr. developers, some of these people *might* make the cut.
that these "cutting-edge skills" that employers always complain are so hard to find in job candidates are always left undefined? That's because if they name them they'll receive thousands of resumes from unemployed software developers who already have those skills.
Given the evidence that many long-employed software developers fail to pass your test, you can't figure out why companies have been paying them all these years rather than wondering how you can improve your interview process to lower the number of false negatives.
It is better to breakup big corporations into smaller entities to solve unemployment problem and promote competition.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
Sad that even with unemployment at record highs, somehow companies still have the gall to whine that they can't find qualified people. Granted there's a lot of lying on resumes. But those making the hiring decisions still make amazingly poor calls even accounting for that.
My most recent experience was with this crazy recruiting agency. You can't persuade them to send your info to their clients. They filter out people for the most astonishingly flimsy reasons. They wanted a C++ programmer, and I have many years of that, in addition to lots of other things like an advanced degree. Next thing I'm being told in a roundabout way is that my resume isn't good enough. The recruiter decided that 5 of those years didn't count because it was teaching, so just like that I'm not experienced enough. He pushed me to put more stuff on my resume. Didn't say I should exaggerate mightily, but the implication was strong. And he didn't like it that I'd been out of work for 8 months. Meant my skills had faded. Or there was something wrong with me. Must be some good reasons why no one wanted to hire me. The next day, he sent me a short email informing me that the job had been filled, and thanking me for my hard work. Hard work? Am I to believe any of that?
I'm sure an experience like that is typical. It says loud and clear that there is no shortage of people. When employers and recruiters reach like that to find reasons why people aren't suitable, the obvious reason is that they're swamped with job seekers.
I haven't even been trying to find a job. I'll get interested again when some sanity returns to hiring practices, unemployment comes down, and I need more money. Or if someone seeks me out for a great job, something interesting where I actually get to work out good algorithms for difficult problems, not be a dull business application code monkey banging out cheesy scripts that barely deserve being called programs. Slashdot posted a story a few days ago about startups not being able to find good people. I've done that sort of thing several times, and I like it. But I have little faith that they're serious, that they aren't all talk and no action. And there's the matter of pay. No, I won't work on someone else's fantastic idea at minimum wage plus stock options that could go underwater without warning. And no, $50K per year on 1099 doesn't cut it in those places where housing and rent is still insanely expensive. Why don't you move your company out of such places, or encourage telecommuting? Until things improve, don't see why I should waste time hunting. I have plenty of my own ideas I can work on for free. I'd rather spend my time exploring fun sorts of coding and research unlikely to be done on typical job, looking into starting my own business, and working on these ideas I have for technical books.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Interviews often really are a problem. I am freelancer for years, but still hate them. Would I be able to pass the FizzBang test? On my own at home? For sure. During an interview? Not so sure. Even though I have a proven track record of successfully completed projects and a couple of small open source projects on sourceforge I constantly fail interviews. Do I care? Not really. I still have more project offers than I can handle. And those who actually hire me try to keep me as long as possible. What does this say about me? I'd say technically ok, people skills suck. What does this say about the people who hire? They don't know their jobs and might reconsider their hiring requirements.
In the eyes of the HR department. The same assholes who want 5 years experience of a product released a year ago, don't value experience gained a year ago if you were involved in a task that would broaden your skills base. HR departments are a far greater threat to the Western World than Bin Laden and Al Quaida put together.
Bankers are probably a bigger threat, but they are well paid, so they are exempt from any kind of management. ("If you are so clever, why aren't you rich?" is the other side of "he is rich, so he must be clever!")
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
'BOOM' indeed. The only 'BOOM' I hear is from your ass - farting out loud. Rascal.
I can't play the game in the United States
The result would just be pissed off workers, I'd sooner take someone from the bottom and bring them to the top with the threat of returning them from whence they came than play this US game.
If you look harder you will find that Slashdot is dominated by moral liberal sentiments - i.e. against laws that criminalize victimless behaviours, such as drug consumption - but not by economic liberal sentiments. In fact, after the banking crash, posts by true believers in unfettered Capitalism and the Free Market as solutions for all problems are extremely rare.
It's thus not at all inconsistent when you see somebody defending decriminalization for drug consumption in one post and more investment in training and hiring local workers in another.
(PS - There is some logic in stimulating local hiring as means of increasing the share of income that a local economy gets from companies: ... well ...local: they typically spend most of their income in the country they are in.
- Large companies are international: they spend money in many countries and pay dividends to owners all over the world.
- Locally hired workers on the other hand are
- An increase in profits of a company will thus result in a lesser stimulous to a local economy than hiring more workers locally and/or paying them higher wages.)
Latest is greatest in IT sector.
Include buzz words in your CV.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
Yeah, but who'll explain this to the persons who actually recruit? Most of the time the recruiters (generally either HR folks or so-called 'job consultants') don't know what they're doing or what they're talking about.
"That's a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers, whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry"
I never understood this. I don't deny it's a common view in the industry, but does it make big difference in reality? Someone who was a good programmer a year or two ago, may be a touch rusty, but they very rapidly come up to speed. Programming talent seems to be a much more valuable attribute that knowledge of frameworks, libraries etc.
My employer generally rubs it's hand with glee when it gets a CV from someone who's just returning from a career break. It's often a sign you can get someone good on the cheap, because other companies will be hesitant to take them.
If by senior you mean bordering on or actually a software architect, I'd agree. Where I've worked, senior engineers are still expected to know the nuances of the APIs like the junior engineers. Otherwise you get senior engineers who can solve really tough problems in the abstract, but use the wrong APIs. One of the examples that comes to mind for me are the "performance-driven" types I've seen use Vectors instead of ArrayLists in Java web apps.
It's worth noting this hit the site at 5:01 CST, which means half the US was already off work (and we all know thats when you read /.). Perhaps when the yanks get work the libertarians will pipe in.
Since the UAW is the last major remaining manufacturing union in the US, I'll point out a few things to you...
1) The average hourly rate, if you throw in benefits, of UAW employees was $75 just a few years ago; American, non-unionized workers at Honda plants get paid an average of $20/hour according to the same article I read. One of my bosses has relatives who work at a Honda plant in Indiana. As they rightly point out, in five years, they'll likely still have a job when the UAW doesn't because the Honda workers know that $75 is just ABSURD for a manufacturing job short of "principle engineer of the entire facility."
2) The UAW is a ponzi scheme. Younger workers today don't get paid crap compared to their older counterparts. It is like the Social Security ponzi scheme, only directly in their paychecks. They work harder than gramps so that gramps can keep getting his health care subsidized 20 years after he quit his job.
3) The UAW has resisted efforts to modernize processes that would bring American manufacturing more competitive with Japanese techniques.
Of course, the real solution would be to make radical reform of the labor laws and the tax laws that cover employment the main priority. It's too hard for workers to work for themselves and to work cooperatively. Starting a new business or working for yourself should be as simple as drafting a business plan or scribbling down some terms on a piece of paper, sealed with a handshake.
(since someone modbombed my other one)
Calling them "skilled workers" is a joke. Fake qualifications, poor work, and the US-based guy has to clean up the mess.
Fire those H1b folks, replace them with US citizens, and get on with the day.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Compare the cost in time and money of a business opening in a new country versus an individual gaining a work permit or citizenship.
The business can hold multiple "citizenships" while the individual has to go through immigration.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Just make it legal to bullshit on the resume and cheat on employment tests in the same manner that the offshore worker gets to do. Allow it as long as those "skilled worker immigration" programs exist. Regularly point it out every time someone complains about the legalized fraud.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
There's no "shortage" of programmers with "cutting edge skills", nor do we "go stale" the longer we're off, like bruised fruit. The tech companies are lying through their teeth, because they don't want to pay US wages; rather, they prefer paying a fraction of what we get... then throw their hands up in the air when things don't work, or the economy's not recovering because there's so much unemployment.
Then there's HR departments, and at least a third of recruiters, who have no idea what they're hiring for, or what translates to what skill, and don't care to learn, even though it would improve their job performance.
mark, fed up
Once a good software architect, always a good software architect.
I exchanged a few e-mail messages with a main-stream media writer on this subject a couple months back. She seemed to think that everything we'd learned -- all of it -- has to be cast aside, and new material learned every 2-3 years. That's a huge exaggeration for any field, even medicine where the new research results seem to contradict the old every few months. The principles and foundation hold true decade after decade after decade.
I don't know of a single programmer/ analyst/ software engineer I've worked with who did not engage in continuous learning. And besides, the guys like Capers Jones, Watts S. Humphrey, Gerald M. Weinberg who measure such things, have concurred with the overwhelming anecdotal evidence that it takes only about 2 weeks to pick up a new programming language and IDE, and between a week and 18 months to deal with a major paradigm shift in design philosophy with new terminology and new meanings for old terms and such (employer investment in training with some substance to it can shorten the time considerably).
I've been doing a survey of algorithms texts, examining editions from the 1970s to present. There have only been a few marginal changes in the content over that time, and a very few significant new algorithms.
Most of the "new" programming languages I've seen in the last 12 years are merely variants of C, requiring little change in approach. Once you've learned one of them, you essentially know them all, and it's just a matter of moments, once you're aware of the kinds of variants which exist, to adapt without having to memorize the details and keep a mental table of all the languages and specific syntax and features.
It's all about cheap, easily brow-beaten labor.
Ed Yourdon was one of the first to note the destruction from cross-border bodyshopping and off-shoring, even if he misinterpreted it a bit.
A program where we explicitly look for people who are going to leave again in a few years, improving the overseas competition, is just dumb. If they're sending as much income as they can afford back home, that's not so hot for us, either.
I'm happy to have immigrants come in who bring their whole families and intend to stay. That goes for the Ecuadorian cooks that supposedly run most of the restaurant industry, too.
Yes, I've interviewed candidates... scared a couple off when waxing enthusiastic about the interesting things they would have the opportunity to learn (I found out later they thought it would be a burden rather than fun, so it's just as well).
I do, and let me tell you, it sucks.
Well, sure. Interviewing is not usually remotely as interesting as doing the actual software development work, or even work in a science lab or economic research. I'd place it somewhere between flipping burgers and shoveling out the barn, but you occasionally get to meet some very interesting people.
We've had open reqs for months now that we haven't been able to fill
That's your fault. Have you reconsidered your "requirements"? What is it you actually want to accomplish?
and that's not due to lack of trying.
So, what, exactly, did you try? How many newspaper ads around the country, and trade/professional pub ads and job site ads did you place? How many universities did you visit and set up a table in the university union on how many days? How many networking events for the unemployed did you visit? How many old professors did you ask for recommendations on recent grads or experienced professionals of their acquaintance? On how many bulletin boards did they post your job ads? How much effort have you invested in seeking old pros who are unemployed or under-employed? Have you visited other sites which have discussions of the dysfunctional job markets? (There are at least 5 Yahoo! groups, alone, lots of usenet news groups dedicated to related topics and many more with overlaps, much discussion on related topics associated with relevant articles from IDG/Computerworld, eWeek, UBM... via which you could easily find good people.)
How many US citizen candidates did you fly in? Did you pre-pay their hotel and rental car or pick them up and drive them, yourself? Did you show them the great products your firm is developing? Did you show them the great tools you have for them to work with? (If they weren't impressed, maybe you should hire them for ideas on how to improve.) Did you show them around town? Oh, you don't have money for all that, you say? Well, then, you don't have money to hire, so you'd better stop wasting your time and get back to work your own self.
I recently read a comment from a (now) friend who was my manager years ago; "If I need a Sr. Engineer, I advertise for an Architect. If I need an engineer, I advertise for a senior".
Eric Schmidt was caught out running a similar scam several years ago, setting phony "requirements" 3 grades above what was actually needed to do the job for which they were hiring. The scam was (is?) to hire people at junior salaries and require senior skills, knowledge and experience.
I recall a remark from a couple VPs. They said that you should restrict your requirements to the bare bones of what you just have to have, list a few "nice to haves", look for the brightest people you can get, and be prepared to stumble onto and take advantage of valuable combinations of abilities and experience you hadn't thought of. Sometimes, it helps to think of why you think you have to have something, the reason behind the reason, and then reconsider what your actual requirements are from that POV, because people have a tendency to get stuck in the middle in mental boxes that interfere with and misdirect us away from making progress toward the genuine goals. Don't dawdle. Work with what's available.
What this tells me is that you'd rather waste months and whine all the while, than invest in flying in good candidates, relocating the best, and a few weeks of good training in some specifics needed for the job... let alone making interviewing and employment a mutually beneficial arrangement. Other execs and managers have said it a different way; they don't want to invest in their people and nurture mutual loyalty; they'd rather bodyshop, under-compensate and have dishonest people who claim they can "hit the ground running", even if it costs more in the long run to repair their messes... and still whine.
Slow to hire? I know a number of companies that still can't find people.
Once again, you fail to entertain us with the impressive story (or impress us with the entertaining story) of your herculean efforts and goals.
I'm trying to hire a programmer out of college. No particular skill set - just a programmer with BS in CS. Have posted on facebook marketplace, craigslist, 10 very large universities, a few other places... It's been a month. We need someone bad. It sucks.
So, you're not willing to hire anyone over 20. That's age discrimination, and there goes over 90% of the CS talent pool.
"No particular skill set -- just a programmer". What hardware, OS, compilers, IDE, frameworks, libraries do you have? Do you have an Apple ii or an Atari 800 or a Sol, a Cray or a Cyber 930, or maybe a Cyber 6600 or maybe the ETA 10-Q? If you have "no particular" needs, it doesn't matter whether they're famliar with UNIX, or Linux, or Solaris, or Mac OS X, or Windoze, or AOS/VS or PLATO or NOS/VE or VMS or Irix or COS. It can be in Fortran ii or Algol or SNOBOL or Perl or APL or PHP or LISP or Awk or Python or Objective-C?
You've only posted on a few freebie backwaters. You haven't placed any newspaper classified ads in major markets (let alone display ads). You haven't posted on job web sites.
I'm not sure what you mean by: "10 very large universities, a few other places." Did you set up a table in the university union for a few hours each day for the last month (while most people were away for the break between Summer and Fall terms)? Did you pin your business card or job ads on bulletin boards? Did you speak with CS profs? Did you place ads in publications that programmers, analysts and software engineers read? Were these 10 large universities in different towns or different states or different regions of the USA?
As others pointed out, how much have you budgeted for the total compensation package, for interviewing expenses for flying candidates in, for relocation, for training?
Is this a real job or a yet another temp gig?
Bang on. That's why smart companies like Google run interviews that test problem-solving skills rather than some particular api.
The set of smart companies certainly does not include Google.
2007-01-24
Rob Enderle _Dark Reading_/_TechWeb_/_CMP_
Executives and recruiters often behave stupidly
"a recent interview with Google's CEO [Eric Schmidt], in which he discussed the company's [alleged] staffing problems and what it's doing to [make them worse]. Like many companies that experience very rapid growth, Google is having [self-created] problems getting enough [capable] people to do the jobs they [want] done. And, like many companies, Google has been using academic accomplishments as a key metric for weeding out [many very capable people from the flood of] applicants. Google's executive staff has [idiotically] concluded that interviewing takes too long and that by sorting potential employes based on grades -- largely an artificial metric in business -- they are probably missing out on many great employees they might otherwise hire. Unfortunately, Google's 'solution' to this problem is to hire people [who are capable of doing] jobs '3 levels higher' than the jobs they are hired for. This approach clearly addresses the need to fill the pipe-line for potential executives in a rapidly growing company; it could also result in a security nightmare. As anyone in security knows, the most likely employee to steal from a company is one who feels under-paid and under-appreciated."
2007-10-19
Michelle Kessler _USA Today_ pg B1
What's up at Google?
"Google CEO Eric Schmidt said many hires were recent college graduates who received job offers earlier in the year [so, they're discriminating against older STEM workers]."
6% is high when you look at the 4% rate for those with bachelor's degrees... and is even somewhat high compared to the 5% rate for those with associates degrees... It suggests tech regardless of degree level is worse off then either type of degree in general is.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise