Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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."
Presuming that the majority of people in the tech sector have at least a 4 year college degree and thus average nearly the same unemployment rates as other primarily white-collar sectors, I believe "soaring" is appropriate.
This chart shows that people in that category have had no more than 3% unemployment for nearly the last 20 years - including the dot-bomb fall-out. Given that unemployment was roughly 2% before the latest crash, a 200% increase is pretty drastic.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Agreed. Six percent? One in eighteen? Consider the people whom you know who are out of work. Are there at least one out of eighteen whose behavior or lack of skills means they're unemployed for a REASON? Consider the people whom you know who do have work. Are at least one of eighteen of those people whom you think are more of a liability than an asset?
I know several IT/engineering folks who are out of work. With perhaps one exception, I wouldn't hire any of the individuals in question. They're slackers, or in way over their heads, or behave badly in a professional environment. Sure, I'd have a beer with 'em, but hire them? No. That's a higher standard. Wages don't have anything to do with it; the people in question I wouldn't take on at any price.
Tech is doing just fine, at least here in San Jose. I get daily emails or calls from recruiters, my company has unfilled jobs (and is offering a bounty for referrals), and I know that others have the same experience. I'm no hot-shot super-star either, I'm almost 50 (so it's not a cheap-because-I'm-young factor) and it surely isn't because of my looks. I read the required H1B notices that get pinned to the break-room cork board that include the position and salary; we are certainly not lowballing imported labor (I have yet to see one that was less than six figures).
If you're good, you're in.
Other regions may differ; I can't speak to that.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
I have to agree here. I was forced to go the H1B route at my last job to hire an entry level applications engineer. Believe it or not, I couldn't find a single qualified US citizen or resident alien, and we did not have a mystery requirement. It was a solid technical person, engineer, that anyone with a EE or even a physics degree could have done. Just no early career people to fill the role (it was a junior applications engineer role).
It probably cost us the better part of $200K by the time we were done to hire someone from China, after legal and all the fees. The pay was good for the area as well, $80K target, and I would have easily gone to $100K for someone with a couple years experience or a PhD.
Of course, it wasn't IT, and I will probably get my karma dinged by this, but the US is just not turning out home grown talent in mathematics, engineering, physics and chemistry to fill these opportunities. Go to an engineering or science program at mid level to elite university, and not many citizens are in the programs.
Very sad
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
From his comment, we wanted anyone with a EE degree, but would have been willing to pay an extra $20k if needed to hire someone with a PhD, rather then the normal rejecting of that candidate for being overqualified/too expensive.
From my own experience, we ran an internship program a couple of summers ago, and really would have preferred to hire citizens/green card holders, as the legal costs are quite high relative in the total salary cost of an intership. We got exactly 0 applications from citizens and green card holders, and so had to pay the extra if we wanted to have the internship program at all (of course, that's not directly H1Bs, but we then sponsored the people we kept permanently).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
What do you suggest? Hire everybody then fire most? HR doesn't decide who's in. They just do the paperwork. The hiring manager, with input from their team, does.
Yes, we have a coding test, even for QA. We also do background checks to weed out people who are argumentative, confrontational, slackers, or can't stay on the good side of the law (meaning real crimes, not irrelevant stuff like "caught with a lid in college"). We have plenty of ways of knowing they're good before we hire them. So do most companies. It's not rocket science (unless that's the position, of course).
It's not "talking out of my ass", thank you very much.
As for "written entirely by themselves"... coders who have never had to work on a team, work on others' code, or have others work on their code will have a very bad time on a team of more than one. You have to be able to write to coding standards that differ from your personal habits whether you like it or not, you have to be able to read code written in a style other than your own, you have to produce code others can understand and maintain, and you have to do it without turning into Smartass Simpsons Comic Book Guy. Doing it all yourself demonstrates very little of that. A REAL coding test would be to hand someone existing, broken code and tell them to fix it, in the coding style shown... without bitching.
If someone is a standalone coder, then they're not interviewing anyway since they're already working for themself, right? Then they can be as prima dona as they like. Anybody else, check your ego at the door.
When I interview, I am on the lookout for more than just raw skills. I look for Apple haters. They don't get hired. I look for Windows haters. They don't get hired. I look for people who turn into raging assholes on hour fourteen in a row on the Sunday night before release. They don't get hired. Not being a jerk is a requirement, not an "plus", and that is not negotiable. And not to put too fine a point on it, I also look for people who think they know what "bullshit psuedo-qualifications ultimately don't matter". They don't get hired here either.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Yes, but the additional expenses ("legal fees and red tape") for hiring 25 H1B workers is no more than for hiring 1.
Yes, the H1B is being abused something awful. But that's just par for the course for American business: abuse workers no matter if they're Americans or not.
And anyone who tells you that companies are holding off on hiring "because they're so unsure about Health Care Reform/Taxes/or name your Obama Administration policy" they are lying to you. They are holding off on hiring because they're having so much success making their current employees work a lot harder, for longer hours and for lower wages and benefits. When Germany would be shortening hours so that more people can stay employed (which allows them to stay in their homes, feed their families, keep the economy working), America just makes laying off employees more attractive to companies.
American business loves it when there's fear in the employment market. In fact, Ben Bernake some years ago, when he was talking about rising unemployment due to monetary policy, said that it's a good thing to make sure "workers don't get too comfortable".
This is why the US is now a second-rate nation on the decline. Because our society values corporate profits above the labor of citizens. And any first year economics student can tell you, Labor precedes Capital, not the other way around. If you think it's bad here now, just wait 12-15 years. Adult literacy is declining, so we're going to be having even more low-information voters. We're going to think these were the good old days.
You are welcome on my lawn.