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IT Job Hiring Slumps
snydeq writes The IT job hiring bump earlier this year wasn't sustained in July and August, when numbers slumped considerably, InfoWorld reports. 'So much for the light at the end of the IT jobs tunnel. According to job data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as analyzed by Janco Associates, the IT professional job market has all but lost the head of steam it built up earlier this year. A mere 3,400 IT jobs were added in August, down from 4,600 added for July and way down from the 13,800 added in April of this year. Overall, IT hiring in 2014 got off to a weak start, then surged, only to stumble again.' Anybody out there finding the IT job market discouraging of late and care to share their experiences?
What employers demand should not dictate what universities teach.
Otherwise we are quite literally giving a bunch of people McDonald's certifications and telling them that's an education.
Was that a joke? Bring in more H1B visa workers?
I work for a very large corporation that has more than 10k Indian workers in our Indian office. We have systematically replaced standard IT workers with Indian contractors for years. They receive no real benefits and are clock launchers in many cases. If you give them a list of things to do they generally can accomplish them but do not go the extra step to collaborate and work to common goals because frankly they don't share common goals. The best parallel I can come up with is we now have McDonald's IT. If you order off the menu you might get something you can use fast but don't expect great food or a chef in the kitchen. The result is the impact to our teams that are left and are critical to running the business. The impact is so great in my area that we have built and continue to build up small internal IT teams to share amoung ourselves and run our own infrastructure and we call these teams DEVOPS. How crazy is that?
The companies say there aren't enough IT workers. The IT workers say there aren't enough jobs. It really comes down to there being huge numbers of IT workers but very few good ones.
As someone who educates CS students, I see the whole spectrum. There are lots of students who seriously have no interest in learning the material. All they care about is getting a diploma. Where I teach, those students don't make it all the way through the program, due to a combination of poor grades and being caught cheating. But when I was getting my undergrad degree, I was always angry about the fact that employers couldn't distinguish my A's from those of people who didn't actually learn the material.
Not surprisingly, supply and demand is a factor here. With low numbers of CS students, standards have to be lowered to keep the tuition revenue going. As the student population grows beyond capacity, schools are able to be more selective based on SAT scores, high school GPAs, and weed-out courses.
That's all you are, it's all I am and it's all I've been. The drive for the bottom dollar has gotten even more intense in the last decade than ever. Managers, CEO's CTO's, shareholders, taxpayers, regardless - the primary focus is money.
The ONLY IT workers they give e a shit about are the well dressed, smart talking (and genuinely smart) guys who waltz in consulting on how to reduce costs. (ie: you MAKE them money, you're income, not expense!) If you can charge a business 700 to 1500 a day for 6 to 18 months, but in the end of your project they get to fire 3/4 of a team of 100 people then you're _exactly_ what they're after.
I write this unfortunately as a primary support person over the years, maybe due to lazyness, apathy, people skills, depression, personality? Who knows - but I never became a creator always a supporter. I fixed things but I never designed stuff, so now things are breaking less and less, things are finally being designed exceptionally well. Plus there's ways to minimise the impact if things do break. At least in the support area, you are fucked, be it level 1 2 or 3.
They do still need some support people but less and those people generally already have their jobs. So, if you know how to replace systems, "send shit to the cloud" - you're in, save carefully though, because eventually every business will be "on the cloud" and your consulting gig, moving people to the cloud will dry up too.
This is just how IT has gone, let alone the impact of the shitty financial industry and governments fucking up the economy(ies) internationally, gloablisation means move shit to where it's cheapest - and a lot more shit can be moved easier now. We had a good run on the gravy train but that shit is finished now.
I'm estimating a 35 -> 45% pay drop from the job I've just been given the heave ho-from to my next one (assuming I'm lucky enough, I'm hearing an average of 200 applicants per job in my city) I should've damn well become a plumber or electrician. YEah they need to re-train now and then too but you sure as shit can't outsource it to XYZ country.
I think you underestimate the market for engine control, exhaust aftertreatment and safety systems.
What have _you_ done - where is your Git...
What meetup groups do you attend regularly...
Why does your linkedin endorsements are knitting and you have no tech endorsements
Github, Meetup, and LinkedIn. So you want to hire people that spend all their time doing social networking, or people that actually work during work hours and have hobbies in their non work hours? I work in a smallish shop - only about 22 developers out of 70 total employees. The best developers we have are basically unemployable by your standards. At best they might have a LinkedIn page that hasn't been updated in 3 years.
I wouldn't be hired by Google or the others anyways, they prefer fresh young talent and I'm in my mid-30s now.
Let me offer a different perspective. I work in Seattle, one of those hotbeds you mention, but I was recruited here at 30, not right out of school. I think the reason you see the market as stale is that you were a network admin. That role is being automated at a rapid pace. I hope you are studying CS for your bachelors and not "IT". I watch my team struggle every day to find good quality software engineers (not IT admins). We pay well above industry average (50% more), including full relocation costs from across the country, we just can't find enough good software engineers willing to relocate to Seattle. I've done a number of our interviews, and I can attest we don't care what qualifications you have honestly, or your age, or anything else really, as long as you can demonstrate good critical thinking, good design fundamentals, and the ability to write good code.
If you are breezing through your CS degree because it is all old hat to you, don't abandon your path, send me your resume! In fact, it doesn't even matter what is in the resume, just make sure it has the right words to get by HR (antiquated useless gatekeepers they are, personal recommendation is the best way to bypass them), the interviewers don't even read it. Like I said they only care about your ability to demonstrate the skills we want.
P.S. oops, posted this accidentally anon earlier
I'm a java coder, 15+ years. I searched for a job a bit under a year ago and I can relate the following:
The problems:
-recruiters, HR people and management are often completely tech-illiterate, and it's very rare that someone with a clue interjects any sort of useful advice that would help in selecting a useful candidate for a position (for example, there aren't any people with 15 years of android development or GWT experience yet). A lot of this is driven by the fact that recruiters and HR people tend to come almost entirely out of the "pretty girl with non-STEM degree" part of the labor pool and the engineers and the HR types tend to avoid one another and have contempt for one another's roles.
-there is a modest supply of good coders, and a large supply of fair to horrible ones. Many of the horrible ones are amazingly productive, in the sense that they can quickly paint themselves into a corner and then knock down a wall so that painting project can continue uninterrupted. Either no one realizes until much later that those walls were important or everyone is too busy meeting the painting deadline in the first place to object.
-the main needs of the companies (that aren't startups beginning to create new systems) are to bring in new coders who can learn the pile of spaghetti that the old programmers made. The main demand isn't so much that the new guys know the right way to do things, but to learn the system and fix problems without
a) upsetting the original engineers by mentioning the bubble sort you found in their code or pointing out the recursive code block that opens 100k database connections. Remember, management thinks the original engineers are miracle workers and has no conception that they have fake CS degrees from Bangalore and are making the system by cutting and pasting code from a java tutorial. All they know is that these guys deliver stuff quickly and they only cost 40k a year. You cost more than twice that and are complaining about stuff that management doesn't even understand. And all the guys they trust are saying the system is fine.
b) breaking preexisting code by fixing things that depends on the wrong behavior, the lack of encapsulation, creature uses of inheritance, non-threadsafe code, etc. Even a well designed system can be incredibly complex and the concept of engineers designing in overcomplexity for the purposes of job security are far from dead. The gwt/spring/hibernate system I'm currently working on has over half a dozen layers of abstraction between the GUI and the database.
c) trying to raise awareness or (god forbid) fix anything about the company culture that is producing bugs, horrible design and poor performance. About 99 percent of the time, the people you're telling about the problem caused it in the first place. They will quietly ensure that no one important hears what you said and then quietly plot to get rid of you for being a troublemaker.
Any engineer who wants to work in today's economy has to be aware of the huge amount of maintenance work and cultural inertia that will be in play at nearly every workplace. And even if you find an engineering department that doesn't have its head up its ass, good luck getting past HR to find them.
It's essentially random luck to find a job that doesn't suck these days.