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East Coast vs. West Coast In the Quest For Young Programming Talent
McGruber writes "The Wall Street Journal is reporting that tech interns are in high demand in the Bay area. According to the author, 'Technology giants like Google Inc. have been expanding their summer-intern programs, while smaller tech companies are ramping up theirs in response — sometimes even luring candidates away from college.' Meanwhile in NYC, CIOs lament that they are unable to retain 20-something techies according to a report in Network World. Says one CIO, 'It puts us in a really uncomfortable position to have this kind of turnover because knowledge keeps walking out the door. We invest in training people and bringing them up to speed to where they need to be, and boom they're gone. That has been my biggest struggle and concern.' It's the pay, stupid!"
You get what you pay for. If you aren't keeping trainees, you aren't competing on salary. You would think that obvious, I guess it isn't.
This is from the article,
No sooner does he hire a Java programmer and train him in the company's music industry niche, than the programmer is recruited away for a higher salary. Indeed, everyone on Trebino's six-person Java development team has less than one year of experience with HFA, which is the nation's leading provider of rights management, licensing and royalty services for the music industry.
There's only so long you can compromise your principles.
This is another gem,
"They are looking for much more aggressive career development opportunities and the ability to learn new things quicker," says Lily Mok, vice president at Gartner for CIO Research. "Traditionally, it took two or three years for a person to move up into the next level in an organization. They want to be on a faster track than that. They don't want to stay in one spot for more than 12 or 18 months."
Even when CIOs promote 20- and 30-somethings, they often don't have loyalty to the organization, Mok says.
"Don't expect them to stay with you 15 or 20 or 30 years...That's not going to happen," Mok says. "They will stay with you as long as they see certain things, including personal growth or personal value enhancement, whether that's financial reward or career aspirations. But only think about being able to retain them for two or three years. If nothing happens, they will leave after their first year of employment."
Of course Gartner has always had a gift for stating the obvious.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
"We invest in training people and bringing them up to speed to where they need to be, and boom they're gone"
as opposed to, say, employees who spend 30 years at a company, and then have their electronic ID turned off one day without anyone telling them, and someone sends them a text message saying 'we will mail you your stuff'.
you just FIRED all those old people in order to make room for the 20 somethings, so that you wouldn't have to pay health insurance or deal with their maternity leave or, you know, ability to understand their rights as employees.
you think the 20 somethings didn't see this happen? you think they don't know what you did? you think they don't understand how the game works?
where did these kids learn to be disloyal? they learned it by watching you!!!!
Do you realize how racist that sounds? Everybody you claim to be a good programmer is essentially from a predominantly Caucasian country. Third world countries have poor schools, desperate people who lie on resumes to get jobs they are not qualified for, and scummy managers who exploit big money contracts and give cheap subpar talent. It has absolutely nothing to do with people in Third World countries being poor programmers in general. They are just being exploited.
More try making it in that filthy hell hole on less that $150K. I live in NYC and struggle like anyone else with $75K, spam and ramen noodles my friend!
He's got a > 100% annual staff turnover, and practically everything that comes out of his mouth screams "I have no clue about what people want even if it's common sense and even if they tell me to my face".
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I for one welcome our Japanese Caucasian overlords.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
OH, the horror. People don't appreciate that we give them a job and a paycheck. They should be grateful.
Of course, the first time the market slows or we can hire someone cheaper, we can show them the door. After all, we're the employees. We only owe them a paycheck for as long as we need them.
Somehow, I can't garner much sympathy for the poor CIO/CEO/CFO/CPHBO that can't keep staff. They've seen what's happened to their parents, older siblings, and friends at companies, and learned the lesson well. Watch out for number one. Your company, despite all it's statements about loyalty, only looks at the bottom line. That's fine, but loyalty is a two way street, and company's are discovering people care as much for them as they do of their people.
I've seen loyalty - in the military - but it's a loyalty because you know the person next to you would die for you and you'd do the same for them. Most company's have no idea what loyalty is, and will learn, as we used to say "Payback is a MF."
I anticipate, once the economy picks up, a lot of companies are going to be crying about how they can't keep employees despite all they "did for them in the recession" (like layoff people with 3 days notice, demand pay cuts, etc) and how horrible it is.
We're fast becoming a nation of hired guns - which is fine, and as things like health insurance and other "benefits" provided by companies become more portable you see more and more people selling themselves to the highest bidder and moving on whenever a better gig comes around. I'd almost see a return to the guild system - where individuals band together to get group discounts and find work but essentially are freelancers; a modern version of a union hiring hall.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I am one of the 20-somethings who have followed this similar career path.
Simply put - I stay at a company until I feel there is nothing more to learn and/or another company offers a greater challenge & opportunity to learn.
Money generally comes with greater challenges, but it has never been my ultimate driving force. This is the reason why I've never (and will never) accept a counter offer.
So how do you keep 20-somethings from leaving? Build a company that constantly researches & implements new technologies. Build a company that contributes to open-source so developers interact with other (better) developers. Send developers to conferences and maybe arrange for them to speak at conferences if appropriate. Allow them to expense tech books. You get where I'm going here. Nothing is stopping your employees from leaving your company for another hot tech company so it's your job to create an environment that attracts good engineers. A boring Java shop with a CTO that is doing nothing to retain talent is only going to be used as a stepping stone to better jobs.
Jason-Palmer.com
As far as these people are concerned, if you're not in sales, you're losing them money. They're so focused on stocks, margins and anything short term that they are willing to cut and shortchange anything they can. Even if you're essential, or if your job entails customer retention such as tech support for commercial/residential internet service. New professionals might not have the loyalty that older generations once had, and they only have themselves to blame for engendering such attitudes - I sure as shit didn't vote for free trade and globalization.
Far as I'm concerned, with the pay, the studying, the hours and the human factor, I'm done. With the hard work they want from me, focused into another career, I'll hopefully be doing what I really want in the next five years or so. Screw 'em.
I worked as a software engineer for 4 years at a fairly large software company after graduating university. The depressing reality is it's much easier to advance your career by switching jobs than it is by being loyal. I got a glowing review my first two years but did not result in a promotion. Meanwhile there were people who would leave the company, and come back a year later at +1 seniority level.
Oh, a lesson in history from Mr. I'm my own grandpa.
You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
Yes, Montanna has low taxes. Working there doesn't improve your lifetime after-tax income perspective much though.
In my 20's, I got to work in the Bay Area and Hong Kong, as well as retire for a couple years. One place I was a model employee, and the other I had very limited motivation, great pay, but only stuck around a year because it was a hostile work environment.
If you want financial success, you have to work hard, and smart. Getting some of our youngest employees to work (paid) overtime is like pulling teeth. Paid overtime (within rational limits) is the easiest way to turn a good paying job into a great paying job. People forget that their pay isn't just their salary rate.
That sounds like something from my parents generation where you could get a job and feel like it was stable. Business these days has proven over and over again that a job is not stable like it used to be. The norm is to move on more then it was back then and people have changed. If you want people to stick around longer then the norm needs to swing back to long term with good pay and benefits. Otherwise enjoy the turn over rates staying high as the people you try to employee look out for their own bottom lines since their job isn't helping in that area like it once was.
I will say this, I'm thankful I found a job where I can do the 5, 10, 15 year thing. Maybe I'll get lucky and do it as long as my father did in his 42 years of service at one company. Who knows though in this day and age?
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Maybe it's because you've got a bunch of C+ business majors running the show, continually fucking up simple projects.
And then on top of that, treating your software engineers like 2nd class citizens.
Fuck that noise. I left after 6 years and don't plan to ever go back.
I'm a 2000 man.
Once salary is satisfied, what drives us all are 3 things: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.
I get the sense from my friends who work on the West Coast that they get these things from their jobs. On the East Coast, it doesn't seem to occur as often (or at the very least is harder to find.) I'm not surprised that young 20-somethings bail as often as they do in such an environment.
Here's a TED talk about it: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html
I'm a senior dev working in Austin. Just ran my salary through some cost-of-living calculators vs. NYC and San Jose. One says I'd need to earn 1.55x my current salary to live comparably in NYC. A second calculator says 2.27x for Manhattan, 1.90x for Brooklyn and 1.66x for Queens. The second one also claims 1.63x for San Jose.
Citation needed.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Part of it is simple shortsightedness with regards to cost and all that. However another part is you have a greater chance of getting a worker that doesn't do a good job working with your system.
A problem I've noticed in some older tech types is a real "stuck in the past" kind of mentality. They want to do thing they way they used to do them, not the way they are done now, or the way they are done at this location. Resistance to learning new things often increases with age and in computer work, learning new things is always a requirement.
So despite experience, you can end up having a less productive worker. This is particularly true because every IT system I've ever seen is unique. No matter what you experience, you don't come in at 100% on day one, it takes time to learn it and get trained up. If you are the resistant to learning, that can mean never getting up to 100%.
Just understand that with upsides there are downsides too. We just hired a new guy at work who's older, and he has these problems in a mild way. In general he's good but he's awful stuck on mainframes as being the end-all computer solution, since he used to work on them at IBM for years. That's nice, but we can't afford one and never will be able to so it is useless to discuss it.
An example of it in a more extreme capacity is our older professors. Some absolutely refuse to update their knowledge. I've butted heads with one of them over upgrading Cadence because the old version (9.2, like 11 years old) just flat out won't work on new systems. The new version is very similar, our student figured it out in about 10 minutes, but the professor just doesn't want to learn anything new.
I'm not sure where you're getting western coast is predominantly Hispanic and black from. The two cities I'm most familiar with here Seattle and Redmond claim 69.5% White and 79.26% White respectively... I'd say that's predominantly Caucasian...
In particular, be willing to keep up that sort of thing your whole life, including when you are older and it is harder to do. The reason is there ARE environments that value loyalty, and they'll look at your resume and see you have none. That won't automatically be a "no-hire" but it'll certainly put you behind others that don't job hop.
The university department I work for is big on retention. Major pain in our ass every time we lose someone so we do what we can to hire people who will stick around. It is a good work environment. Pay isn't as good as private sector, of course, but benefits, hours, culture, all very good. I love it and I could conceive staying with it my whole life.
So when we are hiring people, one of the things we look at is length of employment. If I see on your resume that you worked at one company for 10 years, that is a plus. Says to me you may stay put. If I see every job being two years or less, I'm not so interested. I don't want a new co-worker who will get all trained up, start to take on some real projects, work a bit on trying to improve things, and then leave for the next big thing, leaving us to find someone else to try and pick up the pieces.
I have no ill will for people like that, I just don't want to work with them, not in this environment.
Just consider things like that long term. Are you going to want to job hop when you are 40? 50? Because the more job hopping you do, and the longer you do it for, the harder it will be for you to find work at a place that doesn't care for that.
Just remember there ARE work environments that value keeping people around, but they want to hire people who will stay around.
Quoted from the interview:
Years ago, when I was first out of college, IT guys worked round-the-clock. My guys work basically 9 to 5, so I find it interesting that people are complaining. The other big reason that people have left is flexibility. We have moderate flexibility. We do not have work-from-home arrangements all the time, only occasionally. The younger people want full flexibility.
So essentially they're not willing to work unpaid overtime, and they want flexibility, which you won't give them, but other employers will. So they leave. And the manager is shocked. He even admits he knows all this. He even goes on to say:
They don't have the same notion that you go to one place and you stay there for five, 10 or 15 years. But the incentives to do that aren't there anymore because there are fewer pension plans and less profit sharing.
So he's also aware that profit sharing and pension plan improvements would help retain workers. These are easy things to implement (they require some paperwork but it's not like making a massive cultural change level of difficulty). In summary: the manager knows why his people won't stay (they want to work sane hours, be able to work from home, have pensions and profit sharing), but he is unwilling to make these concessions, so people leave after one year. He tops this all off by saying:
The biggest point is to get them aware of and engaged in the new business opportunities here.
How is it a business opportunity for the worker if they don't have profit sharing or a pension? And are expected to work unpaid overtime?
The amount of fail here is staggering
I know people on here will say NYC is a great place and all but just because you make $150,000 a year doesn't mean anything. If you are an engineer in the New York area you are going to be working downtown. That means either you pay $3,000 a month for a one bedroom closet or you live 1 hour+ away so you can hope to afford a big enough place for your family. I've driven the hour ONE WAY before for 3 years and let me tell you - it's a drain on your body, your mind and everything else. I am in Florida and get calls and email asking me to move to NYC, Chicago, Minnesota, etc etc. The guy in NYC thought I would be thrilled to make $150,000 a year since i was only making about $85K but once you run the numbers you figure out quickly that i would be LOSING money by taking the job. I make about 70% more but housing is 3 to 4 times more on average for the same sq footage and that is like an hour away from city. Why in the world would i change jobs where i would lose money and have to travel 1 hour each way every day for the hassle of a city environment. 1 hour each way = 2 hours a day = 40 hours a month. A whole extra week that i would lose to do ... well.. anything that i wanna do that i am doing now. No thanks.
So its just not about the pay. its about the location.
It's last year's gripe. Lots of companies have been bringing IT (or programming in particular; for the most part IT never left) back home. For a couple of good reasons: by and large, they have discovered that the "cheap" outsourcing is unreliable (often dowsn't deliver) and of poor quality.
Being a freelancer, I have fished the international programming job boards a lot over the last few years. And a growing trend is for those hiring to post: "North American or European programmers only."
They would not be doing that if they had not been repeatedly burned by "cheap" outsourcing.
"Do you realize how racist that sounds? Everybody you claim to be a good programmer is essentially from a predominantly Caucasian country."
Facts are not racist. So... as you say the causes are probably geographical and political in nature. So what? Did GP say otherwise? No. Any "racism" exists only in your own mind.
If you have been watching the international job boards, as I have, you would see the trend too. More and more employers posting jobs for "North American or European programmers only." (Unfairly, I admit, excluding Australia, which has its fair share of decent programmers.)
They do that for good reasons. And the reasons aren't racist. After all... these are the same companies that formerly hired those third-world workers in the first place.
No, the reasons are economic: turns out that when your outsourced labor produces low-quality goods and are notoriously unreliable, then they aren't so "cheap" after all.
I remember reading that Google was getting as many 75,000 job applicants in a
week. And yet Google is struggling to candidates?
I have been in IT over 30 years, and in my experience, employers are always shortage shouting. They
are shortage shouting while they are laying off thousands of US workers, they are shortage shouting as wages stagnate. They are shortage shouting when doing so completely defies all logic, and evidence. Asking employers if there is a
shortage is like asking a ReMax agent if you should buy a house, the agenda should be obvious.
Worth nothing, objective studies never determine that there is any great shortages.
“There are two types of fool. One says, 'This is old, therefore it is good.' The other says, ‘This is new, therefore it is better.’" --Twain
Daniel
Some days you'd think someone patented "A means and a system for retaining technical talent by paying them more money" and is refusing to license it.
You are strong on emotion but weak on economics.
Otherwise known as a "liberal".
Pay peanuts, get monkeys.