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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.
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.
3...2...1...before that old NAZIS rant
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
...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%.
Like the Helpdesk position I read once that wanted someone with Java, C++ experience and the ability to write his own support tools.
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.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Stupid H1Bs! Stealing our jerbs!
But seriously ... H1B suffers from serious abuses. There are a lot of well-qualified americans ready to take those jobs, but companies don't want to pay what it would cost to hire those americans. It definitely does NOT do what it claims.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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".
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.
" 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"
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
There's Carly "Fired from HP and Lucent Technologies" Fiornia who wants to offshore your job.
There, corrected that for you.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
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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You obviously don't know the restrictions to H1B hires:
http://www.immihelp.com/visas/h1b/h1b-visa-requirements.html (site dedicated to migrants from India but it applies to everyone)
The rules are here. They're (very) restrictive. I'm not saying they work 100% right. But it's not a free for all to hire cheap labor either... at all.
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.
I asked him in his blog, so we'll see...
http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2010/09/silicon_valley_is_americas_wealth_engine_not_its_job_engine.html#comments
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
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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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.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
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
The rules are here. They're (very) restrictive. I'm not saying they work 100% right. But it's not a free for all to hire cheap labor either... at all.
That's cute that you think companies follow the rules like that...
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
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.
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.
Unless someone is cheating (and there are some contracting companies that cheat badly), an H1B is no cheaper than a citizen to employ. The wages are typically slighly lower, offset by legal costs of dealing with the immigration paperwork. Legally, you have to pay an H1B market rate (and all H1B salaries are public, so it's easy to check), and since an H1B worker can change jobs, he'll leave like anyone else if you try to get too cheap (like anyone else, that can be hard right now).
Companies that don't want to pay what it would cost to hire Americans offshore the jobs, they don't muck around with H1Bs.
I can compete with H1Bs, they have the same basic costs of living I do, but there's no way to compete with the cost of living in a developing nation.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Oh sure, you increase the labor supply with people who can't easily switch jobs, then mumble something about paying market wages. Seriously?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
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.
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."
He probably means that for the type of codebase they have, finding somebody who will be productive on it would cost them more than they can afford, so they keep getting to the "yes let's hire" stage and then have candidates leave because they can get more money elsewhere. At least, that'd be my guess.
“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?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
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
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.
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
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
Let me get this straight....you wanted a PhD for an entry-level applications engineer job, and were surprised you had trouble finding candidates?
Methinks your expectations are a tad out-of-whack.
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.
They can't have any American peers, legally speaking. Otherwise, you'd have to hire them.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Seems like you needed to raise your salary offer, since it seems clear that EE educated usians exist and are hired all the time.
If you really had no mystery requirement, I bet you could have found a qualified candidate at 5x the salary.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
What were your requirements for experience?
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Mod parent troll anyway.
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).
Somewhere, there is some bullshit that you did throw in to not get a US citizen.
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.
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.
The error in expectations is the belief that a PhD would apply for an entry-level position.
Learn to write better job postings, or find out why HR threw all of the applications in the trash. Remember- it's not only the candidate's job to fill the position.
It doesn't work that way. You're obligated to look for non-H1Bs first, and to pay your H1Bs at least market rate - you're not obligated to hire an American "at any price." What kind of sense would that make?
In any case, H1B holders often become green card holders and then citizens eventually, which is a fine outcome (an American citizen has the job at that point) and far better than the jobs going to other countries.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
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.
I don't have to acquire enough wealth to retire in California (where I'm working now) - what's your point? I hear it's pretty cheap to retire in the Bahamas.
An H1B can change jobs like anyone else, so the market keeps the cost of employement basically level (H1Bs take home a bit less because some of that money goes to lawyers) at most companies.
However, some contracting companies exists solely to exploit workers in there first jobs, and some of those focus on bringing over H1Bs and lying to them about their ability to change jobs to try to keep them captive at very low pay. The government does chase after such illegal behavior, but neither the current nor previous president has had "crack down on illegal immigration practices" anywhere on their to-do list, so they get away with that crap for longer than they should.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It would make sense to the people that argue that H1Bs are holding down wages.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I think the article was summarizing my general point that the shoe is definitely on the other foot when it comes to recruiting talented graduates from the best computer science programs.
Even though I have had some success, I adjust my schedule to make sure to meet each candidate at a time that is convenient for her, and work very hard during the meeting to persuade the candidate Redfin is a good place to work, which it is. It's a strange dynamic between a 39 year-old and a 19 year-old, and it wasn't what the journalist was expecting to hear when we are in the midst of a recession.
My personal experience is that high-quality computer-science graduates are in very high demand, and that companies go to great lengths to hire them; this is especially true of Redfin.
So, he's saying that companies that want to hire the best potential employees have to make an effort to do so. Not really surprising. You won't get good people just by posting a job ad on monster.com. If you want to hire the top people, you need to realise - as, apparently, he does - that they are not experiencing any kind of job shortage. If you don't want to hire the best, then you can probably benefit from the increase in unemployment.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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"
You gotta be kidding me. I thought all the "no experience necessary" IT jobs vanished in the 80s. Your *only* requirement is a CS degree and you can't find anyone who wants the job? Are you located in Antarctica? Are you paying $2/hour? Is the particular kind of coding mind-numbingly boring for some reason? Something is wrong with your story. It just doesn't make sense. Even a single posting at any university should have gotten you lots of "qualified" applicants if you really are just looking for a bachelors in CS. If for some reason you are located in some kind of Einstein-Rosen space-time anomaly where every recent CS grad is fully employed, you might want to consider judging people by the code they can write instead of a piece of paper. Just take out the BS requirement, but mention that you require a code submission instead. I bet there are lots of people who can write superb code, but don't have a CS degree and thus can't get a job doing something that they are actually quite good at. If you want to be extra thorough have them prove to you that they understand and can use big O notation. Oh wait, instead you could just hire some Indian with lots of paper qualifications. I would highly suggest that you verify their abilities before hiring them and not rely on their degrees and certificates to show their worth.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
The error in expectations is the belief that a PhD would apply for an entry-level position.
Your first job is an entry-level position. That's what "entry level" means. PhDs often make less in their first real job, being seen as overqualified (or as losers) by many employers, unless they get an good internship going.
Learn to write better job postings, or find out why HR threw all of the applications in the trash. Remember- it's not only the candidate's job to fill the position.
The posting was fine, and we didn't let HR throw applications away - we ended up with a good selection of qualified people. As it happens, we were focused on interns from graduate programs in Silly Valley, and focused on second-tier schools (Google and MS and the like were so aggressive with the top tier schools it simply wasn't worth our effort there). The percentage of citizens in those graduate programs is pretty small to begin with, but still I was surprised.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Bullshit. These rules and regulations are not enforced.
When companies layoff qualified and often long term American employees en masse and replace them with Indians immediately then that is not in accordance with the rules but it happens all the time.
When there is no enforcement of the rules there might as well not be any rules.
Um...no. "Entry level" means it's your entry into the field. That PhD degree is what provides the entry, not the first job.
You hire a PhD to solve very, very, very hard problems. You never, ever, ever hire a PhD to write yet another database front end. The former is a job well above "entry level". The latter is an "entry level" job.
Your distinction is probably a moot point anyway, as I've never met a PhD in any field that had no work experience before receiving their degree.
So...you decided on pretty specific criteria, in that they had to be from a relatively small number of schools, and blame the applicants when you didn't find any? Did it occur to anyone that people might get degrees from out-of-state and then move back home when they finished college?
I'm SoCal based and went through that last year after I was laid off. It was ridiculous. I'm a 10 year industry veteran and I was being offered entry level wages for mid level to senior level work. I was making more on unemployment than what was being offered by some of these jobs. I am by no means "senior" level, but I don't warrant entry level wages either based on my experience, recs, and education. Unfortunately, that is most of the market out here in CA. I've been wondering if the companies get tax bennies by having openings, even if they are never filled.
Basically, the market was primarily one of two things: 1) Senior level work for entry level pay or 2) Mid level to entry level work for what I made stocking beer for Budweiser in college
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.
Legally, you have to pay an H1B market rate (and all H1B salaries are public, so it's easy to check), and since an H1B worker can change jobs, he'll leave like anyone else if you try to get too cheap (like anyone else, that can be hard right now).
An H1B visa holder can **NOT** change jobs. His visa is valid only for the specific job he was sponsored for. To change jobs, he needs to find another sponsor (and get a _new_ H1B - which may not be possible), switch to some other visa class (generally not possible, if he wants to work), or leave the country.
Believe it or not, I couldn't find a single qualified US citizen or resident alien, and we did not have a mystery requirement.
I don't believe it. Either you're not looking/advertising in the right places, or you've got some requirement, stigma, or location that's utterly unappetizing to US citizens.
Go to an engineering or science program at mid level to elite university, and not many citizens are in the programs.
My PhD program is 80% or more US citizens. It's one of the top five research universities in the US. We're research upstairs, and engineering downstairs. I can't imagine that my university exists in some crazy, alternate universe from all the rest.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
As it happens, we were focused on interns from graduate programs in Silly Valley, and focused on second-tier schools (Google and MS and the like were so aggressive with the top tier schools it simply wasn't worth our effort there). The percentage of citizens in those graduate programs is pretty small to begin with, but still I was surprised.
Not to flame, but why is it that you were focused on second-tier graduate schools in silicon valley, yet when you were unable to fill the position from this (limited) pool, the next step was to go to an H1B? From that account it sounds like the company did exactly what everyone thinks they are doing - looked at an arbitrary extremely narrow set of potential applicants, and when that didn't pan out (surprise surprise) went straight to finding an international worker. Wouldn't it have made more sense to possibly expand your search criteria to maybe include people from outside a relatively small portion of Northern California rather than jump straight to spending the money on an H1B?
I'm also trying to figure out what second-tier programs there are in Silicon Valley (or the immediate area) that have the potential to turn out PhDs, but I'm not really coming up with much...
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."
Yes, H1B holders can change jobs as easily as anyone else. "Finding another sponser" is just "looking for work" by any other name. Sure, there may be a few potential employers who aren't able to sponsor an H1B, but all the big names can (and here in Silly Valley, all the startups can as well). What you can't do is get fired, then hang around indefinitely looking for work - unless your spouse also has a job here, which is fairly normal in IT.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
There are more PhDs than there are "very, very, very hard problems". If you graduate with a PhD, you might well find yourself hoping someone will hire you "to write yet another database front end". Eh, you probably want a government job anyway at that point.
So...you decided on pretty specific criteria, in that they had to be from a relatively small number of schools, and blame the applicants when you didn't find any? Did it occur to anyone that people might get degrees from out-of-state and then move back home when they finished college?
Did you miss the many times I said we were running an internship program? We were looking for interns from area schools, and Standford/Berkley weren't interested, but that left many others - simple as that. We found plenty of qualified candidates, but none of the applicants were citizens. I'm not sure why you seem unable to accept such simple facts.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
No. It was entry level in that I didn't expect 3 - 5 years of experience. A fresh out of school person would have been welcome. It was for a job working with a pretty high precision piece of equipment, and we would have trained for all the sundry items.
It was not entry level as in dishwashing at a restaurant. We preferred to "grow" our senior people, but really wanted a strong foundation educationally.
You would be surprised how many PhD people emerge into the job market without any salable skills, and are hungry for such opportunities. At least there used to be back in the mid 90's.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
I didn't expect any PhD's to apply. I said it would be a bonus, and that I would stretch my salary range $20K to accommodate. The last time I hired one of these roles was in 1998, and I had been inundated with strong PhD's from a variety of physics programs eager for the opportunity. The one we hired was great and still is in the same company (ironically, he moved to Marketing and is a great resource there).
HR didn't throw any resume's in the trash. We just got garbage. I was serious that we just got nothing meeting the requirements who were authorized to work in the US.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
It might make more sense if you read the thread. We were running an intership program (so H1Bs don't come into the picture until we wanted to permanently hire some of those interns at the end of the program), and we wanted area students (we simply weren't big enough to go ouside NorCal, with the challenges of relocating someone just for the summer, or to get Stanford/Berkeley to talk to us). We found plenty of qualified people to fill the positions, it just happened than none of the applicants were citizens. There are plenty of good schools in the California university system with graduate programs (more focused on professional masters than PhDs, but we weren't picky).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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've interviewed a lot of people for the company I currently work for. We have quite a few H1B employees because we *can't* find enough qualified people to fill our slots. We've got people on board from India, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and probably a lot of places I am not thinking of at the moment. We made an offer recently to a guy from Italy. We also have a ton of U.S. citizen employees (including me), but just finding qualified people is hard. Limiting our pool to U.S. citizens would make it impossible.
We're still trying to hire more people, so if qualified Americans come to our attention we'll hire them too.
Terrorist, bomb, al Qaeda, nuclear, yellowcake, kill, assassinate. Carnivore is dead... long live Echelon.
I sure dont know about that. I graduated 2 years ago. finally got a job about 3 months ago. You can do the math as to how long I was unemployed. Problem is education doesn't give you a whole lot of experience in everything. I get out and "entry" level jobs I find require 5 years of something I never learned at school. Great. If the school taught it at all I might have 2 years worth of experience (since you don't use it ALL the time) I picked up PHP and MySQL in my unemployed time to improve my "skillset" but it doesn't change the fact I didn't have the 5 years people wanted. Much less of everything else they wanted ASP.net, C# etc.
So yea.. there are job listings... but they aren't even reasonable. Not to mention over my nearly 2 years of unemployment, I sent out literally hundreds of resumes. I could count the number of calls AND emails I got on my fingers and toes. Granted, I did apply to a good chunk of those jobs I was underqualified for but it seems people aren't even remotely interested in hiring entry level unless you are somewhat of an expert in your field to begin with. The biggest disconnect I think its the difference between my B.S. and the "entry" level jobs requiring 5 years+ of stuff I've never heard of (or had a chance to work with). Where does one get 5+ years of experience without first getting a job? Its not like you can achieve 5 years of experience in 5 years on your own (you would have to start in the last year of high school and do it through college). Or are you suggesting you go 5 years unemployed?
Yes there are jobs. Yes there are listings. Yes they are "entry level" but the requirements are not but the pay sure is.
insert funny sig here
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.
"There are a lot of well-qualified americans ready to take those jobs, but companies don't want to pay what it would cost to hire those americans."
Why should we pay american costs when we can get the same results only cheaper?
Welcome to free market, sir.
Oh! and thank you for thinking sindicates to be communist and antipatriotic: that only makes our work, for us corporations, quite more easier.
"If you really had no mystery requirement, I bet you could have found a qualified candidate at 5x the salary."
Probably, but I'll bet you -since it's right there, in the message you answer to, that they can find it off-shore for 1x the salary.
Free market, remember? I can get the same for x or for 5x... humm, what should I take?
"Learn to write better job postings"
But... why!? He *did* fill the post, didn't he? And he did it at a fraction of the cost, didn't he?
I cannot help but laugh at the bitter irony of this. You are probably correct in your assumptions, and the obvious solution would be to offer incentives, policy, regulations and law of a more socialistic nature. Heck, perhaps even a socialistic tweak of the direction the nation is currently taking (mostly regarding business and company positioning in society). But that is anathema to american nationalism (the outcry during the healthcare reform was greater than what Obi-Wan heard during the destruction of Alderaan). Thus, anyone that proposes a solution that undermines capitalism (and instead favours citizens) is a communist, terrorist and quite possibly an evil space alien that molests children and eats virgins. And none of those are getting into heaven.
Clarify: Were you receiving applications from US citizens that would have filled the role, except that they were from programmers that weren't "junior" enough?
Seastead this.
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.
Most of us won't go into apps engineering unless we're laid off and desperate, though we may be looking for other jobs. Apps engineers get sent all over the world and have to deal with customers, and in many (particularly larger corporations) report into the marketing framework of the company or sales framework of the company. This means a high chance of boss-> employee conflict, and quite often it means the apps engineer is rated yearly based on sales, shifting their focus out of engineering and into schmoozing. Worse still, AEs (particularly in large corps) are treated as second class citizens, with a big wall erected around the design team who largely treats them as suited clowns.
That said, I find it hard to believe you didn't get any serious applicants, I'm not sure where in the country but where I'm at it seems like there are a ton of people. Keep in mind if you add words like "digital VR control" or "RF engineering", this will drive away a lot of people because they do not consider themselves expert enough in this niche (although maybe they are plenty knowledgable enough). We're all used to interviewing with large or elite corporations where when you say you are an expert in "FPGAs", they are going to grill you on everything from their internal construction, to any of a whole range of tools, to some specific facet of a very expensive niche platform. Maybe you just needed a guy who could write an adaptor for your chip to a customer chip...and now your entire applicant base feels disqualified (wrongly).
From where I am sitting (with a job, but looking) I think there are a lot more candidates out there than there are jobs. I hear about this shortage of people, but I'm not seeing it. Last big company job fair I went to was more like a job circus. There were so many people in there I was worried they'd start kicking people out to keep under maximum occupancy.
It happens exactly once for many with a PhD when the job market is tight. Getting that first job can be so difficult that just about anything in vaguely the right field can be enough.
On the other side of things, where I am we have staff that lecture part time at the local University and they find the entry level technical staff for us. There are also professional societies that have student members - contact one or join one and you then have a way to find graduates or upcoming graduates. It's a much better way than relying on HR staff that often have no clue how to find people for a technical position apart from putting buzzwords they do not understand in an advertisement.
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.
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.
he's just mad cause people don't automatically respect his (future?)phd or want to throw huge wads of money at him before he even gets any industry experience.
and it's all dem foreigners fault.
True, but offshoring comes with a different set of costs and consequences (and laws). One fix at a time.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
So how many grad schools are there in Silly Valley? I mean you're really limited a) by the number of universities offering graduate tech degrees, and b) by the number of candidates who elected to pursue GRADUATE work in the first place. That's a very narrow niche, I think perhaps two people in my class pursued advanced degrees other than myself, and that was back before 2001 when you could recoup the investment required to get the advanced degree in a year.
I think it's understood in the US that unless you want in to academia, it doesn't pay to get advanced degrees. The number of openings you aren't overqualified for are smaller, and the rate of technological change obsoletes your specialty fairly quickly. If you got a PhD I'm sure you're smart enough to adapt and evolve your expertise, but you could say the same for someone with a BS as well who is going to do the same thing.
No, not near junior enough. He wanted a Ph.D. for the 'junior' programmer role. What a tool.
OK, so it cost you $200K to hire a person from China. Based on what you said, I assume that it was the first one.
What's the marginal cost of a hire from China? Once you've hired one, what's the cost to hire another one?
That's why it's cheaper. A company like HP or Oracle hires 5,000 H1B people. The lawyer is paid for. The process is streamlined. It's cheap to hire one more person then.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
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.
Wrong. He says he didn't require a PhD -- merely that if a qualified applicant also had a PhD he would have been willing to pay more. Read more carefully.
Seastead this.
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.
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?
Believe me, hiring americans costs less
If that were the case, then why is it common practice for Americans to be forced to train their H1B replacements?
It doesn't work that way. You're obligated to look for non-H1Bs first
I am sorry, but that is simply not true. A company can hire an h1b even there is an American available to do the job. A company can lay off the American just because an H1B is cheaper, it happens all the time.
and to pay your H1Bs at least market rate
I some career fields, like health care, jobs are standardized, and so are pay rates. IT does not work like that, never has. When it comes to IT jobs the term "market rate" is meaningless.
In any case, H1B holders often become green card holders and then citizens eventually, which is a fine outcome (an American citizen has the job at that point) and far better than the jobs going to other countries.
From the perspective of a US job seeker, what's the difference between losing you job because it was offshored, and losing your job after you train your h1b replacement? At least if you have your job offshored you don't have the additional humiliation of essentially being forced to dig your own grave.
Legally, you have to pay an H1B market rate
In IT, the term "market rate" is meaningless. Jobs are not standardized.
Let's see your requirements. I'd say there is a good chance something is wrong about it. And how much is the salary?
Do keep in mind that "migrant programmers" ... those who moved from home to go to the big city, have in large numbers moved back home. You won't get them back so easily because they have experienced that it is too expensive to live there, especially considering that your company may close up shop in 6 months (can you prove it won't?) leaving them stranded. And you need to offer a pay that covers that high cost of living if you are located in places like San Francisco (and many others). What is the rent on a nice modern two bedroom apartment within 5 miles of the border of the industrial or business section you are in? Multiply that by 4 and that's what the take-home pay AFTER taxes should be.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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.
Yes, H1B holders can change jobs as easily as anyone else. "Finding another sponser" is just "looking for work" by any other name.
No, it's not. Firstly because it costs the employer and/or potential employee $thousands to sponsor a H1B, secondly because the number of H1Bs is limited and thirdly because if the situation is an issue of being fired, rather than looking for another job while already employed, there are severe time constraints.
To say a H1B can change jobs as easily as a citizen or permanent resident is laughable. Heck, even when you have a trivially acquired and practically free visa like mine (E3), it's still not even remotely close to the same thing as being able to pack up and find another job whenever you want.
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
Meanwhile, to get an american to do the job would have cost 2-3x the 'prevailing wage', so they have a huge financial win.
You're mistaken if you think the benefit comes from there - it does not. The real benefit that American companies derive from H-1Bs is their extremely dependent status - their legality of stay in U.S. is directly tied to their work for the employer that sponsored their visa; the moment they lose their job for any reason, they are kicked out of the country. Switching jobs is possible, but mostly hypothetical, since you can only go to another company which would sponsor you for an H1-B (it needs to be started all over again), and there aren't many. What this means in practice is that an employee on that visa has significantly less leverage against any form of direct or indirect abuse by their employer. This can range from withholding raises and promotions to indirectly forcing to work longer hours. It's not something that you immediately see in the pay, but it does, of course, reflect on the local job market.
Now, not all companies which hire H1-Bs actually do this kind of thing. So far as I know, at least some large tech firms, responsible for a large share of H-1B applications, actually don't do that (I know first-hand about Microsoft, and I've heard similar things from people at Google). But the way rules are set up, it's definitely open for abuse - and if you want to fix that, you need to get rid of that employer lock-in.
And if you had paid $120k instead of $80k, you would have gotten someone quite happy to call themselves "entry level", while at the same time, having third tier level skills. Because the prevailing wage is the wage at which you are able to get people to work for you.
But it doesn't surprise me to hear that your company would spend $200k just to avoid paying someone over $100k.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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.
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.
Free market, remember? I can get the same for x or for 5x... humm, what should I take?
Well, if you can get someone at 5X, then that is the prevailing wage. On the other hand, if you get someone for 1X offshore, then you have illegally hired someone from offshore at lower than the prevailing wage.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
because the "replacement" you are training is tracked to be your bosses-boss, not a drop-in for YOUR job. You will do the work to describe your job in painful detail (the main reason for the department's inability to function) which makes them smell like roses, especially when they get the bosses ear for all the things you've asked for and been denied. Of course they have the bosses ear, because the boss spent twice as much money on them, so they must be "better" than those folks.
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.
There's another factor to consider: green-handcuffs.
This is the term used when an H1B worker has applied for a green-card, would like to change jobs, but can't, because it would require starting the application process over from the beginning. Obtaining a green card while on an H1B can take 6 years (or as short as a year). I used to work for a company in silicon valley that would hire H1B workers, pay them significantly lower wages (and get away with 'paying market rate' by changing the job description to one where the market was significantly lower than the position he was actually working in), encourage the worker to apply for a green card, then do what it could to stall the process so they could keep the cheap worker longer.
The H1B workers called it green-handcuffs and would leave the minute they got their green card.
I currently know a guy who went to work for a company on a particular project. the project got canned, so he got moved to another position in the company. a position he hates. he'd leave, but he's close to getting his green card approved and doesn't want to start the process all over again.
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"
Well, same can be said about the whole USA visa system.
It specifically discriminates in favour of conservative countries which treat women as house-slaves and discriminate against civil partnerships. Check the visa conditions on H2,L2 and other visas issued to dependents. They speak volumes about the thinking of USA legislature.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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
Probably has more to do with our alleged Euro friends not wanting the U.S. to poach their talent, whereas countries that treat their women like cattle generally treat all their people like cattle and getting rid of the few troublemakers who have a brain to think for themselves isn't a bad deal. Or, if they treat their people decently but are a poor country, they decide training some of their people in the U.S. for a time and then luring them back to start homegrown companies is a great way to jump start their own techno-base. I know a few Indians who did that.
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.)
"That PhD degree is what provides the entry, not the first job."
Nooooooo.... a PhD is a fine thing, but it doesn't teach you how to do the job of a professional computer programmer. We saw this at my firm when we hired a guy who was finishing his Doctorate in CS, and found that we had to double check everything he did. He was far more concerned with the quality of the code than the quality of the product - a very, very common mistake programmers make in their first job (as an example, he would take great pride in write elegant array handling functions, but forget to output error messages to the user).
I don't want to sound dismissive of CS degrees (I have one myself); I think they expand the potential of any programmer, and I will always look favourably on job candidates that have them, but I think it takes 1 year of work (that entry level job) to make a programmer really useful. Anyone looking for their first job in the field should be prepared to take a lower wage (at least for the first year) as that's when you really earn your stripes as a professional. The expectations, challenges and skills required are not the same in the workplace as they are in academia.
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.
Did you think about paying relocation for someone from, say, the midwest to come to CA? (Yes, I know with the price of CA homes that would have been really expensive, to pay the difference on an equivalent house in a walkable community.) Did you consider paying a lot more, like double? Did you consider just hiring someone with more experience (also for more money)? Did you consider investing in training someone? Did you consider relocating your company to a place with a lower cost of living. Apparently not, and probably why, because it costs more.
So, basically, you took the (perceived) cheaper route. Now, as a business person, than makes sense. Even globally it may make sense (to help other countries bootstrap themselves up in high technology). And sure, maybe all your perceived competitors are doing the same, so you feel compelled to follow suit, even if you did not want to. But, from the perspective of the near-term prosperity of the USA, what our legislators did to support you in doing that is extremely problematical (to use nice words. :-)
When a run down house in a town in CA costs US$400K, then US$80K a year is essentially poverty wages. Kids out of college are getting US$50K to start. Why is it that someone with a grad degree is then only give a bit more? Also, programmers can range 1000X in terms of productivity (some programmers are even negative in their contributions), so the entire notion of tying pay to performance is very broken in the field.
Anyway, with your focus on money and "resources", for another perspective, you might want to consider rethinking how you motivate people in your company. Some pointers to get you started:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/6819187b74f4b7db
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/fa4459793c6b7ed3
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/04fbdf60ad463dbb
Or you can look at how SAS does things to be rated as the #1 place to work in corporate America (although they are not open source, which is the biggest perk for most good software developers over convenient concierge-type services).
Anyway, if local people don't want to work for your company, you might ask why? Has it gotten a bad reputation somehow (long hours, stressful arguments)? Or is it an outstanding place to work that has suffered from a lack of a good reputation getting spread around? Etc. Why is not word of mouth bringing you in more qualified people than you have slots for?
In any case, you'll get more out of your "resources" if you tell everyone to get their vitamin D levels checked (as vitamin D deficiency is an occupational hazard of indoors work):
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
And if you want to understand the social dynamics behind the truth of some of what you say (that indeed most kids coming out of US schools are effectively illiterate in math and science), go talk to Dr. David Goodstein at Caltech (previously the vice-Provost):
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It acc
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
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.
Yes, I received resumes from lots of US citizens. Just none that had technical degrees. Plenty of business, accounting, and marketing fresh outs, and a deluge of people in the middle of their career with similar (read: business) backgrounds "looking for a change" but none with the educational requirements.
I would have taken a mid career person who had a EE or science degree, but I got exactly 0 of those resumes. Well that is not entirely true. I got a couple, but both of them had salary requirements that were much closer to $200K, well out of my range. The Silly Valley seems to have distorted some people's belief in their value. When I told them that it was an $80K position, they politely asked to be removed from the running.
Also, the location (as some have bantered about) is not a totally undesirable place. Tucson Arizona is a mid sized city, with plenty of outdoor activity, 2 hours from Phoenix, a world class university (U of A, which not surprisingly is where the H1B I ended up hiring went), and a reasonable cost of living.
Perhaps IT is filled with abuse of the H1B program, but I can assure you that it took me 5 months, hundreds of resumes before removing the "Must be authorized to work in the USA" from the job requirements. Killed me to do it (and destroyed my budget for the year with the fees and legal costs), but I got a great candidate in about 3 weeks. Had dozens of high quality resumes, and plenty of choice once I removed that restriction.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
Just no early career people to fill the role (it was a junior applications engineer role).
As someone who has been desperate for a job--any job--and been turned down for having "too much experience" may I please extend a hearty "Fuck You" to you, your company, and anyone affiliated with your program.
Do you really think some 55 year-old with boatloads of experience gives a rat's ass if a job is "junior" when they're just trying to keep a roof over their head?
It probably cost us the better part of $200K by the time we were done to hire someone from China
(smacks forehead)
Sorry friend, but you said "an entry level applications engineer" and then you said "junior applications engineer role". Now you see the problem here is that they are not the same thing. The fact that you use them interchangeably makes me think you have the problem. Traditionally junior level jobs require a 1-2 years experience in technology x, y, z. Someone just out of school generally has 0 years experience. But it may not be entirely your fault. I have seen "entry level jobs" with 1 year experience requirements in a ton of technology. But here's the thing, what you did in school doesn't count as experience to HR drones/recruiters. Only stuff done on the job.
Also listing too many technologies makes it harder too. Maybe you worked with Java but mostly did JDBC back end apps. Your job says 1 year Swing or AWT...Ooops.... Or you list 1 Year Java, Perl, C, etc... Java can somewhat transfer to C for syntax (you still have to pick up pointers/memory allocation which is possible). Perl is different but not too hard to learn. And in fact witnessing the one liners experienced Perl guys can spin out, a newbie who writes Java/C in Perl may actually be a plus.... But with Java often the problem I see more than anything are the frameworks. x years experience EJB, Spring, Hibernate, JUnit, etc... pick any subset and add some experience requirement...
The other thing is 100K is a lot. Typically mid/senior people make 100K in many areas. Maybe you were asking for domain specific experience? Or something. Or people didn't trust the salary, expecting 40-60K for entry level/junior jobs....
Your entire rant seems to have overlooked that this was an intership program. This whole thread has taught me that /. has reached the point where people don't even read the posts they reply to - but then, I guess that was inevitable, really. But then, you seemed to have the whole rant about some particular company (maybe your company?) ready, and were just looking for a place to dump it.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
some career fields, like health care, jobs are standardized, and so are pay rates. IT does not work like that, never has. When it comes to IT jobs the term "market rate" is meaningless.
You might be surprised, but jobs are fairly well standardized in software development - almost every large software company now has the same 6 paygrades, though the titles differ (plus maybe a distinguished/fellow/consulting engineer on top). Some smaller companies have the same structure, if the guys who put it toghether have a big-company background. Of course, it doesn't benefit companies to explain this to the engineers, since you have a much better negotiating position if the other guy doesn't know what he's worth.
From the perspective of a US job seeker, what's the difference between losing you job because it was offshored, and losing your job after you train your h1b replacement? At least if you have your job offshored you don't have the additional humiliation of essentially being forced to dig your own grave.
That H1B worker has the same cost of living that I do (plus he probably sends a large chunk back to family), so I can compete with him. Sure, it's nice if the overall labor force is smaller, but for a given guy already in the labor force, it's vastly better for me for him to be an H1B than him working in a developing nation. Software development is a global process now - there are trained workers everywhere, and most of the work can be done from anywhere. That's not going to change, so anything that brings those jobs to America is a good thing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
So rather than expanding your job posting to, say, Oregon and Washington, you decided to import someone from halfway across the globe?
There are far more "professional masters" students than PhD students, at least around here. A professional masters degree from most schools is basically the same classes as the last 1-2 years of a top-tier undergrad degree, plus some project work (and we needed that level of training for an intern to be useful). It's far easier to go after second-tier grad schools than top-tier undergrads, unless your company is a well known consumer-space company like Google.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Where did you advertise?
Seastead this.
(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.
We were running an intership program (so H1Bs don't come into the picture until we wanted to permanently hire some of those interns at the end of the program), and we wanted area students (we simply weren't big enough to go ouside NorCal, with the challenges of relocating someone just for the summer, or to get Stanford/Berkeley to talk to us).
I know it's fashionable not to read TFA or even TFS, but when did people stop reading the post that they're replying to? Is the new fashion not to read anything longer than a tweet?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
You're right, I see that it was someone else originally wrote:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1779942&cid=33503164
"I have to agree here. I was forced to go the H1B route at my last job to hire an entry level applications engineer."
And then I had misinterpred the first three words of this point you made, as I think a few other people who replied did as well: "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."
So, that may explain all the replies you think did not read your comments, people interpreting when you wrote "we wanted" not in quotations to mean you were talking about your own company.
So, that first post, mixed with your later items, was what I was mostly responding to, not the internship point. Sorry for the confusion on my end.
Still, I sincerely tried to help as best as I could. And you reject that and call it a rant and a dump. Ask yourself, is that possibly in any way connected to even just internship hiring issues? :-)
Do you not care about vitamin D deficiency, caused in part by too much indoors work, making your workers sicker and less productive?
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/depression.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/mentalIllness.shtml
Do you not care that I even agreed with the difficulty you raise about finding qualified interns and quoted a reputable person in CA you could easily go talk to if you wanted to do something big about the problem finding US citizens who know a lot about math and science? Someone who testified to Congress on this trend as far back as the 1990s?
Still, is declaring something an "internship" itself just another way to save money? Are you really, sincerely, setting up that "internship" just out of the goodness of your heart to help others and give back to the industry? Or is in just another way to get cheap labor? Or in other ways save money on hiring costs (like profiling candidates as to a work ethic or fitting into your company culture before you permanently hire them)?
"Cheap Labor Conservatives Issues Guide"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/16
Anyway, the ironic thing is an entire computer industry trying to automate jobs away to save money is caught up in a sort of either ignorance or denial of what it is doing... Why can not everyone just accept that, and say, as a business person, you want to get the most work for the least money? That's another part of the H1B problem, because it may force otherwise honest people to start skirting the truth in order to justify and then stand by the paperwork that there were no possible US candidates (even if they might cost a lot more or you would have to pay relocation to CA, so hundreds of thousands of dollars up front perhaps to buy someone an equivalent house to a Midwest one).
So, is the H1B program in part just to deal with crazy CA property values? :-) Or similar programs for importing guest workers? A truly free market would say, look if the people in CA can't raise salaries enough to deal with a crazy property market they helped cause, then tech investment dollars should flow to the Des Moines, or Pittsburgh, or Albany, or Raleigh (or abroad) rather than stay in CA where it is too expensive to buy a house... And some of them are... But the H1B system just papers over that fundamental problem. It says, well, we can get someone overall for less by importing an indentured servant for a few years, skimming the cream off of some other country's crop. Anyway, discussing the strengths an
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
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
Sorry, got mixed up in the /. layout. I thought you were the same one who wanted to pay 80k for an engineer and supposedly couldn't find anyone in the US willing to do it.
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
Seriously mod, troll? Who exactly am I trolling?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Let me get this straight....you wanted a PhD for an entry-level applications engineer job, and were surprised you had trouble finding candidates?
Methinks your expectations are a tad out-of-whack.
Not in this economy it's not. I imagine plenty of PhD's are seriously underemployed right now.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!