Slashdot Mirror
Tech Sector Slow To Hire
Iftekhar25 writes "The NY Times is running an article about soaring unemployment rates for IT in the US (6 percent) despite a tech sector that is thirsting for engineering talent. Quoting: 'The chief hurdles to more robust technology hiring appear to be increasing automation and the addition of highly skilled labor overseas. The result is a mismatch of skill levels here at home: not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms, and too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at lower cost. That's a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers, whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.'"
They're digitalous?
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.
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
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.
Especially since the national average is over 9% currently. Seems to me a more accurate story would be "Tech sector hasn't recovered to previous levels, but has much lower unemployment than many other areas."
Presuming that the majority of people in the tech sector have at least a 4 year college degree and thus average nearly the same unemployment rates as other primarily white-collar sectors, I believe "soaring" is appropriate.
This chart shows that people in that category have had no more than 3% unemployment for nearly the last 20 years - including the dot-bomb fall-out. Given that unemployment was roughly 2% before the latest crash, a 200% increase is pretty drastic.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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 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
Let companies keep more of what they earn and they'll feel more comfortable hiring people, it's that simple.
Ummm, it's not that simple. In general, corporate earnings have been improving since Q1 2010 (when the "official" recession ended). Targeted business tax cuts were instituted in 2009 as part of the stimulus package. There are still not robust increases in hiring. If you look at financial reports for companies that are having increases in earnings you find that these corporations are either (a) hoarding cash, (b) using extra cash for acquisitions, or (c) instituting share buyback programs. None of these things "hire workers". In fact, choice (b) often depresses employment, as redundancies are eliminated in the merged entities. Nor is there any indication that lowering the tax rates further at this point would encourage corporations to hire more workers, either theoretically or empirically.
Do you actually observe the economy and research these things, or do you just get your talking points from Glenn Beck?
That is all.
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
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.
That only works for so long, at least if we're talking about software development. Once you're a "senior developer"-level person, it stops working. You have entry level skills in your new area, but you have senior-level work experience that requires senior-level pay. Companies prefer not to hire such candidates. They assume that the candidate will produce sub-standard output if they pay at a senior rate. Or if they low-ball the rate, the candidate will jump ship as soon as they find a job in their 'core area'.
Unfortunately, not too many development companies have figured out that once you have legitimately reached a 'senior' position, picking up the new language is pretty damn trivial. Each language is solving the same problem over again, with a slightly different solution. Once you have the basic programming concepts down, it really doesn't matter what the API is called.
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.
No. You obviously don't get it. The free market is "magical," as Ronald Reagan once said. The free market takes care of everybody's needs.
No big government is needed, because we can trust big business to take care of us. Don't worry about the minimum wage, because the free market will provide what you need.
What? You're not cutting it? It's your fault, you should be succeeding. If you're not, there is something wrong with you.
Trust in the Free Market! Big Business is your Friend!
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.
[Citation Needed]
The U6 is rarely mentioned by the media regardless of the President's political party.
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...
Nothing is engineering. Engineering is like the scientific method. It's a process, a philosophy, a framework. You can be an engineer and be in IT. You can be an engineer and not be in IT. You can have not gotten an engineering degree and still follow the principles of it. It's only the US that has the hard-on for "engineering" only being what a select few professional organizations claim it is. If they want to be purists, then anyone that designs, builds, fixes or operates engines is an engineer. If they get assholish about it, anyone with a driver's license is a licensed engineer.
Learn to love Alaska