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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?
the jobs are moving overseas because american programmers are lazy and uneducated.
In order to create more programming jobs, we need to allow more H1b visas, which will create more programming jobs here in America.
A rising tide lifts all boats!
Indian programmers are just as good and even if they are not, they cost less than 1/5th of an American programmer. You luddite American programmers are clinging to a dinosaur wage model. The new digital economy has rendered your services much less useful as there are always people in third world countries who will do the same work as you for peanuts. All programming is, is digital bits of information. Since the cost of replicating digital bits of information is zero, then there is infinite supply. Thus you programmers should really feel content to work for free and have knowledge that someone appreciates your work!
The peak times for jobs seem to be autumn and winter - everyone is on vacation over the summer. No one does anything. Anyone still around is covering for the people on vacation. Interviews and hiring are really low priorities. This fall, people will start thinking about next year's projects.
Actually if you look at the innovations in the IT sector there really have not been much lately. The first decade of the millenium saw a rapid expansion of web services which actually delivered never before seen services (from the mass market point of view at least).
Of course you could say that Facebook and such are just iterative refinements of the previous attempts such as MySpace but in my opinion the last few years have seen nothing but small refinements and even these coming only from the big players. No new disruptive tech, nothing new on the web (file sharing, social networks, everything has just stalled). Even the gadgets are more or less the same and it is hard to see an Apple iWatch or VR goggles really expand the IT sector. You actually do not need hire a lot of people to refine old stuff and small start ups rarely go on a hiring spree untill they have got some serious funding which would require something innovative and that is just the problem.
IT Job Hiring in the USA Slumps
FTFY
Philosopher (n) - a wise person who is calm and rational; someone who lives a life of reason with equanimity
I suppose more girls need to learn programming.
If companies were greatly limited in how they can hire foreign workers and even outsource. With the news that all net job growth since 2000 went to immigrants the real question is how many H1Bs are actually doing exceptional work versus simply being cheaper? I bet if we outright eliminated the H1B visa and added some padding to the O visa (exceptionally talented, rare skill sets) we could free up several hundred thousand jobs that should be going to Americans.
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit noted that when his local government in Tennessee cracked down on immigration violations, suddenly businesses that relied on low and unskilled workers had to find ways to entice young black workers at legal wages to take them. Guess what? Black unemployment dropped even though not a whole lot of jobs were actually created--if any. It was simply a political matter of forcing businesses to obey the law (imagine that).
The solution is aggressive immigration control, especially deportation of most immigrants at this point. Legal or illegal, doesn't matter. We don't need them. Our country is demonstrably not better off with them, especially the lower skilled ones (in fact anyone who supports mass immigration of lower skilled/unskilled immigrants implicitly hates the black and lower class white communities).
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.
I've been keeping my eye on the job market, at least for my area, for the last five years. Which is how long it's been since I lost my good job, as a network admin, and have had to scramble to fill the gap. I spent an entire year being told I was overqualified, to much experience, or underqualified, not having a bachelors degree, for the small number of positions available. In the end with nothing coming up I did what made the most sense and went back to school for a bachelors degree as that was something I got told every time they decided I was underqualified.
To start like almost always happens no credits carried over from my associates degree to my bachelors degree, so I've had to start from scratch. I haven't really learned much of anything I hadn't before during this process and if anything some of my technical skills have withered from not being used. I took a student employee job with the IT department at the university, because at least they were happy to have someone competent but as a student employee I have a fixed wage at minimum wage and no more than 15 hours of work per week. It looked like I might get a full time job with them last year when one of the admins left, but the powers that be decided their was no money to replace a person who had been paid from a specific grant (so they wanted to free up that money to go elsewhere while the grant still calls for that position to be paid). It's my last year here and I now have five years of looking at the market.
The market in my region has been stagnant. A few companies are hiring in my region, but with questions about whether you are on an H1b or not and sky high requirements for those positions... I know I'm not the one they want. If I apply anyways I get near instant feedback they I'm not qualified for their position even when I meet all the stated requirements. I would move, but I simply can't afford that and most companies don't seem interested in talking to me if I don't live within a hundred miles of them. Even that isn't a perfect fix anyways... Their seems to be a half a dozen US cities with insane amounts of IT industry activity, about 30 with sustained IT activity, and the rest of the top 100 cities (one of which I live by) are anemic for IT and always have been. I could never seriously afford to live in any of those cities so many of us in IT work in: San Fransisco, Seattle, Austin, etc. I wouldn't be hired by Google or the others anyways, they prefer fresh young talent and I'm in my mid-30s now.
I'm looking into non-traditional computer related fields, because that is pretty much my last hope to have something when I'm done.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
I think thats the best way for me to deal with this issue right now.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Non developer positions are having issues.
Finding developers is getting more and more difficult.
Devops is growing.
Maybe time to learn to code and not just click away at control panels?
-- $G
... the economy of US is not booming
No matter if one can write high level code or whatnots, it still gonna be linked to the economy
People do not hire IT workers just because they have too much money - people hire IT workers because their companies have IT problems to be solved
And ... this is the kicker ... when the economy is not expanding, companies don't see their profit jumps, and when that happen, they will start looking for ways to save money, and one way to save money is to NOT hiring
The spending power of the people inside the U. S. of A. ain't booming - plus, the US exports also not growing leaps and bounds either
Face it, the economy of the United States of America hasn't been in too great a shape since the 1990's, and the future sure ain't look so bright
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
... there simply aren't enough experienced developers to fill demand. Any experienced Ruby/Rails developers who move to Melbourne can pick and choose who to work for at the moment. Same wages, better standard of living (assuming most readers are from US/UK). Any takers?
Work smarter, not harder.
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.
Big companies like Facebook and Microsoft are waiting to see how many H1Bs Obama gives them when he does an end run around Congress on immigration later this year.
Kids, that number is going to be larger than 0. You have no one to blame but yourself if you voted for this mess.
All job markets are local. I don't care so much about what the top-line number is for IT jobs. I care about what the market is for my specific skill set in the area where I happen to live. Obviously if the national number plummets then that trend will eventually be replicated in the majority of individual markets, but from the summary of this article it doesn't sound like we're talking about the number "plummeting".
At the moment, for my specific skill set and in the specific area where I live, the job market is about as good as its ever been. If I were to lose my job tomorrow my chances of acquiring another one reasonably quickly would be better than during any of the other times I've been jobless.
I say that since one of our more "productive" guys produces nothing but quick and dirty garbage.(Which seems great until you look at the code and see how much of a pain it is to maintain.) Lets see, it's slow because parts of it are On^2 but he claims it's linear in speed. (My guess is the only order he knows of is linear.) Nearly everything is spelled incorrectly and a huge percentage of the classes have names that don't actually match what they do. There's constant attempts to re-invent the wheel which end up not working as well as the built in ones.(I mean doing property sheets and pages from scratch?) But hey, he gets his code out "quick" and it's other guys that are the problem when we can't add features as quickly as management wants.
I am hiring; can't fill the positions and I won't use foreign workers... Why can I not find anyone - Taking a school degree is not enough or a rubber stamp seen on TV class or learn Java in one hour...
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
If your sitting at home unemployed - what personal coding projects have you done while your off work?
None?
NEXT!
Most of the comments and discussion in this thread seems to be geared towards programming and development as most /. discussions do. There is more people in "IT" than that. The hardware and tier employees, system administrators, network engineers, security engineers, infrastructure, and specific disciplines like SAN, visualization, SQL, SRM, DR, Exchange, messaging, voice etc.
From my experience, there is always more people looking for a job in the late spring and early summer. Bonuses if any in my industry are usually paid in the second quarter (if you're not there, no bonus for you), and people with families like to move in the summer if possible and are looking for a different job.
I;ve had a open position for 6 months I've been trying to fill. The market for for people with "converged IT experience" is big right now. Someone with a decent level of VMWare, SAN, DR, and Windows server experience are hard to find. So are really good Cisco people. I've got a lot of resumes with a lot of the key words in them but too many people think they are experienced with something because they used it once or were a small part of a project and they may have had a hand in it for a small part. Very frustrating. Just for reference, at least in downtown Chicago and NYC, a person with 5+ years of well rounded senior level person with VMWare, some SAN, and Windows is going for $130K. A "good" Cisco guy starts at about $140k.
If this is accurate, then it sounds like your former employer was massively overpaying you and was smart to let you go. They can hire a new you for 35-40% less.
The market slumps because there's a whole lot of people that show experience companies do not want.
My project at a huge company just finished, so I started looking for another one: I interviewed in six places, got six offers in two weeks, 2 paying as much as my old job, 4 paying from 10 to 20% more. 4 were from companies in town, 2 were bay area companies asking for telecomutting. The salary that pays for an OK experienced programmer in the bay pays more than an architect makes in the midwest, and it's hard to hire in the bay if you are not a big name, so companies are starting to look outside for quality candidates.
But that's the thing, an applicant need a resume proving that you learn new skills quickly, and that he is working on tools that are growing in adoption, like languages with functional programming elements. The cost of a bad hire is just very high, it's just too risky to get someone that has a good probability of not working out.
they want H1-Bs because they don't have to _train_ them. The H1-Bs are no better (or worse) than local employees. The H1-Bs come over trained in very, very specific tech. e.g. not just JAVA but specific JAVA libraries & tool kits and how specific industries use them. They do this all on their own dime and their own time. You can't compete with that without taking a huge risk. If you spend 5 years learning the wrong tech you're entire careers is shot. So is thier's, btw, but there's plenty of them and we don't talk about the ones that don't make it...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
From what I've read this has only accelerated since I saw it happening working over there in Mountain View. I finally found the right English word for the phenomenon of code.org and other astroturf campaigns about programmers in the U.S: "mendacity"
Your post is redundant, when it's a hirer's market at the moment. Very very few jobs can you leave one and get the same pay. Not when there's 200 applicants per job. Wages are in freefall over here (AU)
The GP poster was probably not being overpaid. It's just that in the current market and the high applicant/open-positions ratio, employers can low-ball on salary and desperate, unemployed IT folks will accept any offer.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Got my CDL and driving forklifts for a living. I make as much money as I used to, but work 20-25 hours a week more to do it. I'm loving the Hope and Change. Work is being Fundamentally Transformedà in the US.
Not redundant. "Obvious" perhaps. I'm not familiar with the situation in Australia, but I'd be surprised if you weren't exaggerating the 35-40% figure. If only because if it were true then I'd expect your employer to have laid you of earlier than they did. For instance, when the potential savings were 20% instead of 35-40%. Though it's entirely possible they're just incompetent.
I don't care what any lobbyist/shil/journalist tells you. IT is dying in the US. We've run out of 'bottom' to chase. The jobs can't be any lower skilled unless they descend literally to the level of button pushing zombie on par with a janitor. No hiring manager has the least interest in skills or what you accomplished before or what you think you can accomplish for them this time. The hiring manager's sole concern is to manage upward to his or her boss who grudgingly told them after two years they could back fill one slot out of 4 that went vacant and it has to be no higher than 75% of 'market rate'. So the hiring manager gets a contract drone who's out the door in 9-12 months. Sure quality suffers, but that's only relevant where quality mattered in the first place. Which is almost nowhere. Fixing that will be some other drone's assignment and they won't be able to get it done either. But again, who gives a shit?
We're defining "overpaid" differently. If an employer lets Joe go, who was earning N, and hires Bob for M, who is just as productive as Joe, then Joe was overpaid if M N. The employer was paying Joe more than necessary to acquire his labor output.
Companies are outsourcing to India for dimes on the dollar.
That's what my company is doing. They have basically told us we won't be doing any in house development. My COO flat out told me they were going to using people from India because they can pay them a dime on the dollar. The whole line of people who are in any kind of development track all will have to take a "skills assessment" to see where their skills might best fit them elsewhere in the organization. All DBA and server administration work is being transferred as well. Guess what NO IT job is safe these days.... IT -IS- a dying field in the U.S. unless you want to work for dimes on the dollar... Maybe those striking fast food workers will find themselves outsourced by Indians as well.
They call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it!
The Truth is a Virus!!!
If this is accurate, then it sounds like your former employer was massively overpaying you and was smart to let you go. They can hire a new you for 35-40% less.
I'm not abrasion so quell that thought buddy. You are a fscking moron for the comment you made to the other person. Many of us have been laid-off as a cost-reduction strategy by short-sighted management. My salary has been on a steady decline for the past decade as a consequence of these "thought leaders" and "best and brightest." With over 2 decades professional experience and currently unemployed I feel as though I made a terrible mistake pursuing a career in many roles within IT. Maybe the universe was giving my a sign to avoid this fate before I really began. Unfortunately I ignore the universe and am paying dearly now.
I was talking to a young, bright FBI agent last month and when I said that I was a software developer she said quite appropriately "aren't we all?"
I'm afraid that IT is becoming very much self serve and the few remaining Development/IT jobs are going to be very specialized and hardcore positions.
If you have a clown suit, you can go work for IRS IT.
What was moronic about it? The poster claimed he will only be able to command 35-40% of his previous salary when he finds a new job. Presumably his productivity will stay roughly constant, assuming he stays in the same industry. So the "market value" of all that he brings to the table is actually 35-40% of what his previous employer was paying him. Ergo his previous employer was overpaying him. If I can buy an identical car from two dealers, A and B, and they provide equivalent customer service, have identical policies, are equally convenient, etc., but A charges N and B charges N + $1000, then buying from B is "overpaying". Likewise if I can hire either A or B to perform a given task and A and B are such that they'll perform it equally well, but B costs 35-40% more than A, then hiring B is "overpaying" to have that task completed.
It may well be that your layoff was shortsighted. But how do you know? Is it possible the layoff was, in fact, the right move to make with respect to the business's short-term and long-term success?
If your salary has steadily declined then it's because your skill set has become comparatively less valuable over time. That's likely the result of a whole host of factors, and isn't necessarily caused by the employers in your industry acting contrary to their own self-interest (i.e. being short-sighted).
It is entirely possible you have, in fact, made a terrible mistake. And I don't say that to be mean. It absolutely sucks. But it is what it is. If I were in your shoes, the main question I'd be asking myself (and I'm sure you are) is: what can I do about it? Unless it's reasonable to expect that the trend will reverse, and it probably isn't, then it may be time to consider switching career tracks. Or, alternately, relocating to someplace your skill set is in higher demand. Obviously both of those are more easily said than done, but they're not impossible.
We're hiring, but can't find a single decent development manager. It's been 6 months. Why is it hard to find someone that doesn't list a million technologies and languages on a resume, but can't answer core fundamental technology questions. It's been 9 months to find a Unix System Administrator that's more than a command monkey.
Do NOT come to Indianapolis for IT!
Pay rates are low even adjusted for the cost of living (which is dirt cheap for a northern city) and IT workers get ZERO respect unless you are working for a profit center (you are doing IT staffing, contracting or are a programmer writing product to be sold).
Between H1Bs and large contracting pushing down rates and squeezing out locals at the big operations (Lilly, Sallie Mae, Allison, Caterpillar, etc.) about the only good place for IT long term is working for state or the federal government (which is even lower pay but you might actually get a career out of it)... although many of those jobs are being handed over to contractors, too.
About the only place I have heard pays well for IT is Angie's List and it's only for programmers... that company is a ticking time bomb, though. How they stay in business while loosing money every year they have existed is a miracle of a pyramid scheme.
I am the last of my friends that came out of college in the early nineties still in IT. The rest have moved on to various other careers (several became attorneys, two are doctors, and one crazy bastard is a deep water welder... he makes more than all of us).
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Get into security. Sure, they COULD outsource this... but rest assured your management will be paranoid enough not to.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Reading these comments I see a lot of frustration and anger. Rightfully so, in some cases, but I think everyone needs to understand a few things.
1. World is changing. Right now, there are millions of technically-literate, hard-working Polish and Chinese (as examples) ready to jump at the next opportunity. This wasn't the case 100 years ago because of wars, lack of global media, and education (among other reasons). Today, they know they can learn Java or C# and get a decent-paying job.
2. Who can blame them? The tribal part of me wants to say, "Keep the immigrants out!" because, by definition, more competition will lower my own wages. However, the global citizen in me says that, yes, I might make $10K less a year in five years, but at least some hard-working people will get a better life. Totally worth it, IMHO.
Please note that because the United States does not easy visas for high-skilled workers, the companies will outsource to India instead of hiring them out-right and bringing them and their families over to the United States. That means no income tax, Social Security tax, even though these folks are being hired by American firms indirectly.
3. If my post seems contradictory, it's meant to. Economics and immigration policy are very difficult to get right. There's a million ways to get it wrong, and only a few ways to do it right. Every country wants to get all the benefits and none of the costs, but it doesn't work that way.
150 years ago, raw sewage was flowing down the streets in NYC and London. Back then, if I told you I used Italian olive oil, drank French wine, and ate imported cheeses, you'd think I was a king! Nowadays I can get Greek feta for $5 a pound and get a bottle of French wine for $20.
Why? Globalization, that's why. My only message is that we have to start thinking and acting like members of the human race. Ask hard questions, don't take shit for granted, and look at the beautiful world around you. What do you want the world to look like another 150 years?
IT Hiring is fucked permanently because we are susceptible to the fraudulent belief that Indian programmers are as good as their American counterparts. This ignorance pervades corporate IT hiring, whereupon outsourcing looks pretty cheap when compared to hiring a competent American. Alas, they fail to consider the risks because IT is an EXPENSE, not an INVESTMENT. #idiots
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Want more IT jobs, make it hard work again:
- Bring back Windows NT.
- Make HDD's fail more
- Make network unstable
- Ensure PC hardware constantly fails
Its common sense, the issue is:
- Hardware has got more stable and reliable.
- Software has got alot easier to manage, mostly automated and alot more stable 24/7.
- Anyone can do it.
I receive several job solicitations via phone, email or other means on a weekly basis. A lot of them are offering more than I am making at my current job. I usually ignore them. I ignore them either because I am not qualified for the particular job or because I a happy where I am at. The lack of hiring is either because people are happy where they are or are under qualified.
For those of you that say people are telling you that you are over qualified, they are BSing you. You are under qualified for the position they are hiring for. Any company will make an offer to a truly over qualified candidate. It is a bargain for them. You tell them you are over qualified when you deny the offer.
I've had to go through the process of hiring people several times. It is not in my best interest to not make an offer to an over qualified person. I have seen plenty of under qualified candidates. They either believe that if they have experience somewhere in the field that they should be qualified for any job in that field or they have come directly from college or some certification and were brainwashed into thinking they would make 100K+ with no experience. By no experience that also includes no passion. Just because you can pass a test does not mean you know how something works. There are a lot of people out there that pass the test but do not continue learning on their own. These are the worst and probably the ones that tend to think they are denied a job because they are over qualified. You are not over qualified! You have no experience, no self knowledge and can not progress with the company.
So to sum it up. The lack of hiring is because of the lack of truly qualified candidates.
Don't act like members of the human race! humans suck. Sound ridiculous? It kind of is. But it's not much worse than telling men to not be aggressive and violent against their natural inclinations. That doesn't work so well either, but we try... we don't evolve because we won't allow evolutionary pressures, artificial or natural.
Humans evolved to be petty tribal creatures living in small tribes. We are not evolving anymore and situations like our current global economics don't create evolutionary pressures -- at least not positive ones... If you are a smart ape you can do the majority of jobs in the world; that is, until robotics takes over (which is capable already and the transition is only beginning.) We are not competing for the best as much as we are competing for the most desperate. Manufacturing robotics won in the USA decades ago that is why worse-than-slave labor in the 3rd world was used-- because those desperate humans can still beat the robotics... until today. Now we shall see the transition as the desperate 3rd world people lose the last hold out position humans had against the robots (in manufacturing.) This isn't a new situation; technology transitions created similar situations in history.
Human nature is tribal. Tons of science to back that up. People are all Little Eichmanns as proven in countless studies of various situations, where tribalism is at the root of some of them. It doesn't take hardly anything to abstract consequences for one's actions which makes it so easy to do evil. If people would just seriously study and learn about the nature of EVIL they would avoid systems which promote it. You'd think religious types would actually learn about the "devil" and thereby learn something useful... even if it's fictional, it's metaphorical for emergent behaviors in humans.
Belief aside, we don't study to avoid situations that promote bad things - in large part because we falsely believe (without evidence) that people are responsible for such things; instead of realizing the environment is a much much larger factor. Naturally, in a society that prides itself on individualization they are going to be the most blind to the truth. (I live in the USA, which is so ironically conformist.)
You don't think about or really care about sweat shops making your clothes - it's too far removed and those people suffering are not in your tribe... if they were, you couldn't ignore the problem so easily (it's not exactly tribal based; however, if you felt more connected to those people you'd not ignore it as easily.) You steal tiny things from your employer, that is normal-- not even thought of as stealing. pencil etc. It's not a big deal; plenty of studies on that. Well, when you save $5 on some clothing your stealing from others in a similar "harmless" situation. Besides, just look at how sales motivate people - now undo the sale and increase prices -- that is what fair trade does; relying on the consumer's to police everything with their $$$ is beyond crazy and all the science backs that up. Shopping is all about the experience; you pay for that gratification and a few minutes when you unpack it at home, then it's all gone and you have to shop more to get that experience again... which has to have roots in hunting/gathering behavior. Most ads are about the experience; making you shop and only a minority are getting you to switch brands (that is right out of modern advertizing 101.) Anyhow-- the point is, all that increasingly advanced psychology is to get you lost in the shopping experience which goes a long way in masking any minor considerations like fair trade. A 10% off coupon works really well-- now if you have Chinese vs US products and you don't need a coupon... Hopefully my rambling is making some connection; there are many aspects to outcome.
Globalization is NOT a good thing and we have to stop portraying it as such. Now don't go to extremes and think we should have none of it; but like most things it has a range of options. We are too extreme on 1 side
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
all the talented, flexible, non-sociopathic programmers are currently employed.
So perhaps it's time for federal and state labor departments to figure out how to make better use of talented, flexible, underemployed programmers who happen to have mild psychopathy or sociopathy caused by Asperger-type autism spectrum disorder.
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.
All the comments here seem to be related to programming but IT is more than just that. We manage over 1,000 servers and can't seem to find a Unix admin in the area that is interested enough in Unix to dig into how things actually work. I mean, if your response to "how do you make a network interface persistent" is "first I click on the menu", we'll likely knock a point or two off. We've had prospective Unix admins admit they're afraid of soft links. We do a lot of scripting so telling me you don't know how to script is likely to knock a point or two off. And it'd be nice if you knew how to disable programs from starting up by understanding how the files are set up in /etc/rc* vs using chkconfig. Sure it works, but we're more than a Linux shop.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
The solution is aggressive immigration control, especially deportation of most immigrants at this point. Legal or illegal, doesn't matter.
So you want to deport legal immigrants :)
Ha ha... That's just stupid, by the very definition of legal..
government in Tennessee cracked down on immigration violations, suddenly businesses that relied on low and unskilled workers
Few IT jobs are occupied by low and unskilled workers... Why don't you take unenlightened anti-immigration rant somewhere else...
the real question is how many H1Bs are actually doing exceptional work versus simply being cheaper?
I'm an H1-B, relocated from Denmark, working in SF, and I can assure you that I'm not cheaper :)
.....we could free up several hundred thousand jobs that should be going to Americans.
If my H1-B was revoked I would move to an EU office for the same company, doing the same job, at approximately same salary.
My point is this, Silicon Valley can't be the tech hub, if people can't immigrate, in fact the hassle of getting a visas today is enough I wouldn't care if the company didn't hire paper pushers to do the work.
With respect to job availability, I see emails from recruiters trying to get me to go to a job interview every week...
It's not my impression that there is an abundance of skilled IT workers.
It really comes down to there being huge numbers of IT workers but very few good ones.
Spot on, I rarely meet people who deliver above and beyond...
:)
But I don't know if one skilled motivated superstar developer is worth 5 slow moving developers...
But I have experienced teams of two skilled devs, making things move faster than a team of 10 average developers
(Of course partially because of communication overhead, and lack of one single person having real responsibility).
But I am a middle aged white female software engineer. No one wants an old white lady on their team of 26 year old guys. This career is like modelling - at some point your brain is considered too old.
With a 1 year learning curve before my employer breaks even on a new programming hire, they don't like replacing people. And that's just for the basic work. When it comes to new project work that is required to keep up with customer demand, that takes another few years. Programmers are an investment, unless all they know is writing code, but they're no more a "programmer" than someone playing Candy Crush is a "gamer", more like a "code monkey". If you're a one trick pony that can only write code, be prepared to be replaced.
It doesn't interest me though :/ if anything I've found the majority of security people I've dealt with, technically incompetent and cause nothing but trouble. 9 times out of 10 they are over paranoid to the levels of extreme AND don't know shit about IT.
Furthermore, with the whole "send it to the cloud" philosophy, yep, even security people are being reduced. Who needs a team of 5 to 10 security people for desktops, servers, networks etc when a large portion of the infrastructure is now located off site and presumably X cloud provider will handle security?
If anything, "the cloud" was a godsend for IT. Nothing convinces a manager more quickly that outsourcing is a BAD idea than a few months of "the cloud" experience.
Even in the few cases where there is no data leak.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...and then some. Sincerely, a classic asp developer who hung in there.
GE is in full swing hiring mode in IT :
Locations at our IT Tech Centers: Detroit metro, New Orleans, East Bay SF (San Ramon)
Need contemporary skill set - cloud services, contemporary infrastructure, and agile SW development. FastWorks mindset.
No shortage of great opportunities. IT hiring is very very good right now. Really depends on geo location.
I do IT support work in Silicon Valley. While unemployed earlier this year, I interviewed for 60+ jobs that paid anywhere from $15 to $25 per hour. One recruiter told me that hiring companies will need to offer $30 per hour to keep workers from flocking to San Francisco. I normally make $25 per hour but accepted a job that pays $24 per hour with paid holidays and vacations.