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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
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.
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."
It is a real issue, but HR is the most massive problem in the IT sector today. They get a list of requirements and filter based on those. Many of the folks that have those requirements that are unemployed are unemployed for good reason. There are however a whole slew of people that could do the job that don't have exactly those requirements that get thrown in the trash by many an HR clerk.
In my experience the above is the leading cause of IT understaffing. Personally I look for a "Skills" section on a resume, and test the claimed skills in an interview. If they can get past my cursory test they're worth a shot, if they are just good at BSing then its obvious within a month, or at least well within their 3 month probationary period. You get more quality employees that are actually interested in what they are doing that way. Of course you end up interviewing more complete idiots as well, but its no loss, as you were going to interview (approximately, again, in my experience) the same amount of unsuitable candidates regardless.
Its partly a problem of the jargon too. Most of the HR folks aren't going to have a clue how your previous job relates to this one or how your own pet projects relate to the job you are applying for, but for an engineer say, they realize that working as building designer for 5 years necessarily includes that you have a lot of civil engineering requirements even if you don't have a degree in civil engineering. If you have 10 years experience working in C with some minor experience in Java but the job requires almost pure Java, the HR girl/guy likely doesn't have a clue how the skills could be transferable and will dump you in favor of someone with a college/uni degree that focused on Java at some point, meanwhile they end up firing the guy because he cheated his way through school and doesn't actually have a clue.
I DO know the rules, and I have also seen first hand how the companies that abuse them are evading them. The most common strategy is to list an impossible requirement, and then miraculously find that the foreigner they want to hire happens to have that on his resume. Miracle of miracles, the job is filled. Meanwhile, to get an american to do the job would have cost 2-3x the 'prevailing wage', so they have a huge financial win.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking