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Report Cites Highest IT Job Growth In 4 Years
netbuzz writes "Employment research firm Foote Partners says U.S. labor statistics from last month reveal an increase of some 18,200 jobs in IT, which represents the largest such monthly jump since 2008. 'The overall employment situation in the U.S. is lackluster, in fact this is the fifth consecutive month of subpar results,' says David Foote. 'But the fact that more than 18,000 new jobs were created last month for people with significant IT skills and experience — and nearly 57,000 new jobs added in the past three months — is incredibly good news.'"
57 thousand new jobs in the last 3 months, with 18 thousand last month. This leaves 39k for the other 2 months, netting an average growth rate of 19.5k jobs/month for those 2, in other words, the rate of growth is is nearly 10% slower than it was a month ago.
Is this report counting the *real* programming and IT jobs, or just the ones that companies post with ridiculous qualifications, just so they can run to Congress and claim they can't find American personnel to fill them and get more H1-B visas?
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
They're hiring more IT professionals to feed to crocodiles and we have a contract to deliver them!
they can bite my shiny, metal cabinet
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
And you may get paper superstars that say the have a big skills list and know lot's of buzzwords.
Any ways asking people to do the work of 2-3 people can lead to burn off, being spread too thin, and the hit by a bus issues where you can get be a real hard place.
When I see job growth return to 1999 levels, then I will think things are getting better.
Or maybe they are at those levels - overseas, that is.
And maybe the jobs are coming back, but will all those long-term unemployed IT workers be re-hired? I don't think so. All the new hires will go to new and recent college grads.
In the meantime, the unemployed have all those student loans to pay .... just think of the drag on the economy because of it.
If only student loans couldn't be treated like a Wall Street bail out? You know, loans picked up by the government and the folks who got the loans can give themselves a bonus for "screwing up".
for people with significant IT skills and experience
And the only way to get most of those skills or experience is to be employed in the industry and working for companies who are willing to train you. People coming out of school or switching careers need not apply.
This goes along with the 2012 report from ManPower (which just came out) which says more than half of the U.S. employers surveyed say their pay scales are not in line with what IT workers want, which makes it hard to attract and retain staff.
The report goes on to say that many companies have scaled back on recruitment benefits such as relocation costs.
In summary, you need to have years of experience in cutting-edge technology, willing to work for pay which employers admit isn't up to par and able to pay for your own relocation.
Gee, wonder why people are saying they can't find people to fill positions.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
For entry level jobs at least other places do say Associates or Bachelor Degree OR X years of work experience.
Any ways for most IT jobs I say Associates + other NON Degree class loads should be a the max.
As college Degrees don't really fit to well in to IT and there needs to be bridge from NON degree classes / on the job leering to a GED like system.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-03-11/news/ct-oped-0311-page-20120311_1_college-costs-rise-kayla-heard-college-attendance
accommodate even market rate....
"Incredibly good news" should be some combination of rising employment and rising incomes.
Wanted. IT Help Desk Associate. Salary range $15,000-$25,000. BS in Computer Science and 20 years Java programming experience required. No benefits.
Despite the somewhat rosy job numbers there is a sobering reality in today's job market. If you are very experienced and have good contacts there are lots of jobs right now in IT. I get emails from recruiters every week it seems. But if you are just out of school or are not highly specialized then your options are much more limited because now you are competing against cheap foreign labor for programming jobs. Many times I have sat in meetings where we are looking at the resume of a recent grad and quickly realize that we could hire someone from India for 1/3 the price. Of course the quality of the work from the people in India is often sub par (at least in my experience) but to the people that control the money it looks like a no brainer. They hire the person from India. It's only when you gain more experience and skills that are very hard to find that the India option is no longer viable. At that point you have more control over how much you can charge for your services and potential employers have a vastly smaller pool of people to choose from. The challenge for the new grads is how to bridge that gap and it's a vexing problem. Gone are the days when IBM would hire you out of college and give you lots of training and a job for life. Now they expect you to already have the skills and you're only one bad quarter from getting laid off.
Seeing as this job growth happened while Mitt Romney was running for president (thus forcing our current, unamerican president's hand) I'm going to go ahead and give Romney credit for any new jobs created. This is just a small taste of the amazing things that will happen under President Romney's firm but loving leadership.
When I see job growth return to 1999 levels, then I will think things are getting better.
So you think things will be better if/when we see the fictitious job growth levels powered up by the dot-com speculative bubble, the time when it was possible for any greenhorn to get paid $60-70K a year just for writing html????? You are an interesting creature.
I for one prefer the status quo in IT/Software than the ridiculous dot-com bubble times. I would also say we are saturated - we have quite a few in IT/Software that are really not cut for this (testament of this is the shitload of crappy monkey code that exists despite all the advances we have made in the art and science of developing software.)
Been kinda sorta looking. Had 4 great interviews with 2 good offers which I ended up needing to turn down. Interviews were high quality with extensive programming and aptitude testing. Probably the best interviews I have had in my life. My current position was a luck of the draw "You are a computer guy? Come work for us and we will give you endless tasks and complain about 'nothing' getting done although we really don't know what you are supposed to do." Burned out? Yes. Spread thin? Of course. Happy? meh.
Seems that the bigger companies are willing to pay good salaries and offer day one benefits. Yep, you need experience. Definitely still need to put in time as an intern, sysadmin or test technician unless you have a 4.0 with a Masters or PHD.
MBA? Sure, you could be an analyst or in management. Without the technical experience, you will not really understand how the customers idea will work and will not understand your people.
New jobs added, yes... but I bet they're still not filling them because of a huge disconnect between IT and Recruiting/HR. "We need MOAR H1B's!!!!" -Battle cry of every company inept at hiring IT talent.
I just hired a new guy a month ago. It took about two months to fill the position. I interviewed a lot of subpar candidates and extended an offer to one guy who ended up taking a job elsewhere. Within the organization we have hired half a dozen IT positions in the last six months. Over the next year we are going to fill another dozen.
To people who say finding good candidates is easy, while it might be some what true for entry level positions, mid-level to senior positions are hard to fill. Even if you find a candidate with decent tech skills, they might be a socially inept moron who do not fit in with the team. They might have nine years of experience in an irrelevant technology and six months of experience with the position you are hiring for. In my case I found a lot of project management types who were light on tech skills.
The reality of the market place seems to be that if you really have skills, you can command a good salary and work just about anywhere. There are not enough qualified tech people out there.
Just wondering.
in IT we need to look past degrees and go to a differnt system.
maybe a apprenticeship system or a mixed class room / real work plan
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/07/18/manufacturing-industry-taps-colleges-help-alternative-credential
may a GED like system as well.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-03-11/news/ct-oped-0311-page-20120311_1_college-costs-rise-kayla-heard-college-attendance
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-03-25/news/ct-oped-0325-page-20120325_1_collegiate-learning-assessment-college-students-richard-arum?goback=.gmp_2084356.gde_2084356_member_141583962
"I recently wrote about the possibility of testing and certification for what I called a "college-level GED." Like the current GED test for high school equivalency, it would award certification to bright, hardworking job applicants who want to show potential employers how much they know, even though they never graduated from college."
I seem to recall Donald Knuth saying something to the effect that 1 in 50 people was capable of becoming a competent software developer. It would be interesting to see the number of jobs that were needed, but I might estimate that we are already at saturation point.
When you add these crazy requirements, the pool of qualified applicants goes down slightly.
Add in an expectation for developers to work for below average wages...
You have as good a chance going to the park and finding a purple squirrel.
Which is why the term "purple squirrel" is becoming somewhat of a buzzword.
You won't be paid as if you had 10 years of experience,
Lol, you don't get paid as an intern AT ALL.
It's always been my experience that the worst enemy to the IT geek is the next IT geek...
Instead of having a back and being there for each other through thick and thin, they always undercut and sell-out to clients or management. Maybe it's like this in other fields? Who knows... Either way, the IT person is truly bad about this. Above all else, they always bitch and complain about how there's no talent and how everyone else is never good enough, especially when it comes to "finding real talent." It's truly pathetic.
There's 2 things to keep in mind with all this: A.) "real talent" is relative / subjective and is precluded by each specific situation at-hand as no consistent infrastructure ever exists between different organizations, and B.) every IT person is the epitome of the managerial roadie, nodding his or her head every time the boss wants some new toy because to do otherwise would result in a red mark at the end of the year.
The problem here isn't that nobody is good enough. There are plenty of ripe minds ready for the picking that can bring unimaginable benefits to a company that is competently-managed by those capable of seeing and understanding this new generation of crop, but what seems to be getting lost here is that those already established seem to have an irrational sense of what to expect from applicants (just like those applying for the jobs have when they think they should be hired) because they seem to believe that there's some sort of magic underground group of people out there who can waltz right into their wolf pack and pick up wherever whoever left off beforehand (which usually turns out to be someone's vacant position who told the company to go fuck themselves once they realized that they were done being taken advantage of, working after-hours, nodding their head to everything just because they didn't want to experience some sort of bureaucratic outfall or yearly evaluation red mark).
So instead of learning their lessons, the businesses and organizations--and those already established in the IT field--keep trying to push all these fancy bell and whistle technologies into the applicants' faces in hopes of being able to find someone who can run the company for them instead of realizing that the kind of people they want to have in their ranks require molding and effort to create on their part.
In other words, instead of wasting time hiring yearly quitters and bitching about why some greenhorn isn't good enough to pass your bullshit code samurai muster, why not get your head out of your ass and start being a professional planner who can sustain the training of said greenhorns through prolonged training regiments? Accommodate for incremental needs one on-the-job experience situation at a time and watch the fucking flower grow for Christ's sake.
You want that next Olympian to come in and run your systems for you? Train them. Start off small, work your way up, and tell your boss to shut the fuck up and eat it because they have no idea what you're doing anyway. If they think they can run things better, let them try... After all, you're already awesome, right? You can pick up and leave because you have all the wonderful experience these green guys don't, right?
Sorry, can't find the link now but I read somewhere - just last week, that the IT-related fields in US had a persistent unemployment rate of over 4.2% for the past 3 years
While that's half of the overall 8% unemployment figure, methinks the IT field shouldn't be rejoicing
Not yet !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Maybe that is the problem with using c#. The good devs don't want to die on the microsoft vine.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Compile and run this on your Linux box. This is common enough that it's good to know what happens under the hood. In particular, consider the code path that would have to be taken in order to call global constructors *without* using pre-main hooks. (Note: I had to play with angle/square brackets to get the include line to stay untouched by html.)
#include [cstdio]
class Foo {
public:
Foo() {
puts("Before main.\n");
}
};
static Foo gFoo;
int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
puts("In main.");
}
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
CS is not help desk or sysadmin.
A 2 year tech school will tech you more then a 4 year CS.
Cheap recruiters and contract shops are muddying the waters. There is so much percieved demand that these shops inflate the numbers even further. They're looking for fresh BAs to buy cheaply and sell at a high price. They are not interested in experienced personell. I've hat roughly 10 recruiters hit on me within the last 8 months or so and only two even got back to me with a oneliner email.
On the other side there are countless projects and lots of dormant investment money with all the threads running through the few overworked project managers who do 30 interviews a week to find "The exact right guy (TM)".
The truth is: It ain't easy. IT still is in its infancy, the world actually *is* getting more complicated and hiring and finding the right job is a slog and requires you to turn down 20 dimwits before you score a position on a team that isn't a complete waste of time. On the one hand you've got doucebags who couldn't version their code if their life depended on it, on the other hand you've got douchebags who'll bite your head of instantly if you can't set up a Unix demon by heart. ... It ain't easy in our field, that's a simple fact. Yet I'd still rather do this than flip burgers.
For almost a decade now I've been moving back and forth between easy money / money to burn and super-broke and living of ramen. Right now I'm in a ramen phase and don't know how to pay the next rent. ... I'll survive, I guesss.
More and more the world is becoming just like a Neal Stephenson novel. I guess that's just the way it is. Learn to adopt and make the best of it is my motto right now.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I teach CS, most of our students can get entry level programming jobs (40-50K range) as juniors or seniors