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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?
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.
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
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.
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.
Finally, somebody cut to the chase rather than going off on some other tangent. Glad I read this far to find your post.
Little hiring occurs in the summer. All the decision makers are on vacation or taking half days. Project money (and, hiring money) from the budget is getting low. Projects started when they had money are established.
Come autumn, there is a need to burn off excess budget moneybags- use it or lose it. Lots of little projects are started, projects get defined at a high level and budget requests for the next year are made. If a department does use their allocated budget, they will see a drop for the new year without extenuating circumstances.
Early winter, there is a flurry to hire people, likely contractors, to do the little stuff. Real hiring starts at the beginning of the year and runs through the remainder of the quarter.
We aren't seasonal workers like retail. Our work force isn't returning to school creating a need for immediate hires. Where we run into problems is when management treats employees like disposable contractors only to find they need to hire later rather than pace the work and retain their workforce.