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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?
...or the standards of computer science education in Western countries could improve? We could start with insisting all CS students learn a close-to-the-metal language like C, and not graduating JavaScript specialists.
And how many jobs actually require you to get "close to the metal"? It's pretty few and far between in practice. Besides, only bad programmers are reliant on the first language they learn. Good ones can pick up the best one for the job at hand fast. Are you stuck using the first language you learned? I learned the ropes using BASIC but I haven't touched it since. It really doesn't matter.
And how many jobs actually require you to get "close to the metal"?
The important ones. Like, developing software for control units in vehicles.
I said "how many". Not "what kind". There aren't that many jobs developing vehicle control units. Maybe in 20 years when self-driving cars fully take off.
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.
Unfortunately, a lot more employers are demanding quick-and-dirty JavaScript-style solutions than rigorous close-to-the-metal C solutions.
Because getting a pretty UI up in a hurry makes it look "done", but making something with quality takes time without "doing anything" that PHBs and users can see.
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
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).
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?
there are always people in third world countries who will do the same work as you for peanuts.
I remember spending hours untangling Bangalore Spaghetti Code. One application used a 2,000 character url string that passed the administrator user name and password in plain text. Cheaper does not mean better. People over there can work for peanuts because they live in cardboard ghettos. Maybe we want our people to have indoor sanitation, running water and electricity.
Maybe we should be considering trade barriers instead of feeling like we need to compete with starvation wages in every third world hell hole on the planet.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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
The age-old fallacy that what specifics you teach people has any correlation to their future careers.
If you're a programmer, the language does not matter. It's literally that simple. You could WRITE your own language if it came to it.
If you're not, learning some language that's a passing fad is hardly worth worrying about compared to one that went out with the Ark.
In the same way that all my science classes taught me that Pluto was a planet, all my CS classes taught me about languages from the 60's that aren't in use any more. Literally, by the time you get to the workplace the language does not matter. It's like a car mechanic who's repaired some Fords in the past... it won't help him much on the new Fords or on other models if he can't use the underlying skills instead of the rote teaching.
Course languages should not be chosen to suit employers who - generally speaking - by the time those students graduate will be demanding something else. They should be chosen to promote understanding and completeness and practicality (I'm not saying we should all teach a language that doesn't exist outside of academia, for example). Just for the simple matter of students being able to obtain a compiler and get to grips with it at home, if nothing else.
But saying that business should dictate the languages taught is nonsensical. Things used in business are generally a BAD IDEA. We know they are. Because they are quick, cheap and dirty. That shouldn't be the basis of an education, especially when - as you hint at - it's the theory that matters.
For the record, I have been "officially" taught BBC BASIC, Visual Basic 3.0 and Java. And I have a degree in CS. Only one of those is close to a useful language any more, and that's the one being ridiculed in the previous article for it's use in the world's most popular brand of smartphones nowadays. If anything keeps me in a job, it's C, SQL, and the ability to quickly read example code from any language (PHP, Ruby, Perl, VB, C#, you name it) and knock up something that works by knowing that they are all pretty much the same at the bottom.
Course languages have almost zero correlation to future success. Business is already suspicious of people who do a 3-year CS degree and then tell you they can program anything in Java. It honestly doesn't matter what the language is, so business shouldn't be dictating it.
... 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 !
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.
Could you please point out the benefit for US American programmers of a job they don't get hired for being in the US compared to a job they can't get hired for abroad?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well, it would make my job so much easier. It's kinda hard to explain to someone who has no idea what he's doing (i.e. someone who never saw ASM or C) why buffer overflows are BAD, why (and most of all how!) to avoid them.
Security would be a much easier job if "programmers" (I'll use the term very loosely here now) didn't stare blankly at you if you tried to tell them that garbage collection isn't just the term I use for the bus that takes them back home from work.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
iirc Automotive Linux [ http://automotive.linuxfoundat... ] is HTML5/Javascript on the frontend...
I think in the business context cheaper is almost always "better". I've dealt with reams of horrible code also, but at the end of the day most people just want a product that looks like it works. They don't have the technical experience to determine whether it was well built or not, just how it behaves on the surface under ideal conditions.
Programming as a profession is getting priced out. First they came for Support, then IT, etc. DevOps will eventually fall to the wayside of automation which is the whole purpose of the job. Programming will get eaten away. There will be high level consulting and architectural jobs for a while, but anything else is a losing proposition.
You two seem to be using different definitions of "rigorous". He's using it in terms of mathematical rigor. You're using it to describe things that are tricky and difficult and where there's little margin for error.
I'd like to push back against this. I'll agree that the specifics of what one learns in university, assuming we're talking about someone who got a Math/Physics/CS/Engineering degree, likely aren't predictive of long-term career success. That said, subject matter can be decently predictive in terms of short-term success. If I'm looking to hire a junior Java developer, say, and I have two candidates in front of me who appear to be equally hard-working, intelligent, sociable, etc. but one exhibits high Java proficiency and the other has never seen a line of Java then I'm going with the former. Your skill set does matter when it comes to getting a job. Your point is that anybody who's a decent dev. can ramp up on almost any technology. I agree. But not every employer is willing to pay for the lag-time for you to ramp up. Especially if you're competing with other candidates who are already ramped up.
I think you underestimate the market for engine control, exhaust aftertreatment and safety systems.
Yes but remember that programming is mostly about eliminating other jobs. So it does have a cannibalizing effect but in general everybody else has it much worse.
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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/
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)
Where in God's good name did you get that idea? People over there that right code live in houses just like us. They have a sizable middle class (it's about the size of the United States Population). They're cheaper because there's 3/4 of a billion people living in poverty, which makes labor prices for their middle class much cheaper. They write spaghetti code because everybody does from time to time.
Whatever else you think they're not inferior to you. Stop thinking that. It plays into the hands of the big corps that want to use cheaper labor to drive your wages down. You won't see it as a threat until it's too late and you're working 70 hours a week to make ends meet. Start asking your politician why we're not putting up tariffs. Join a Union if you can and get into a voting bloc. Start protecting what you have or it will be taking away from you...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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
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.
And how many jobs actually require you to get "close to the metal"?
That's the wrong question.
The real question is "How many jobs need you to understand what the metal does when you write code in order for you to be any good". The answer is "almost all of them".
Sure, there are rapid application development (RAD) environments that allow you to create a TCP server in three lines of code with a scale out of 5,000..... assuming you don't actually want to do anything with each connecting client. If you do, the scale out suddenly drops to 5 unless you know what you're doing.
And here's the sore point - most programmers don't. They don't differentiate between capabilities given by their environment which are expensive and those that are cheap. They were never trained to think that the commands they operate have a cost, and that this cost needs to be weighed and considered.
So, yeah, CS studies are not the place to learn how to use RADs. Pick them up on your own later. You should learn about bare metal programming, about how a garbage collector is actually implemented and what are its costs, about the limits and capabilities of your compiler's optimizer. This way, if you end up using RADs, at least you will not be a shitty RAD programmer.
Shachar
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!!!
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 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.
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.
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.
The biggest problem is the damn forced-use of applicant tracking systems when applying for a position with an organization. Your resume has a sufficiently close to zero probability of ever being read by a human being. And there is the proverbial purple squirrel that every laundry list of requirements seems to seek yet never find (unless they only can be found in India).
I work for a large US corp. We use an applicant tracking system. Hiring managers and internal recruiters scour it constantly looking for that one overlooked resume that the other guys might have missed. But mostly it's about LinkedIn these days: my manager sends maybe 100 emails a week to people hoping to find anyone actually looking for work. We have reqs we can't seem to fill, IMO because developers with established careers haven't figured out yet that opportunity is knocking again.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
I think you underestimate the market for engine control, exhaust aftertreatment and safety systems.
I think you overestimate how much of that requires "close to the metal" programming. A few embedded engineers can write all the gnarly C code, with volatile pointers, etc., to interface with the hardware, and then wrap it up in a library that can be used by other programmers writing the high level code. Most programmers will never need to read a thermistor or use PWM to set a voltage.
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.