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The Great IT Hiring He-Said / She-Said
Nemo the Magnificent writes: Is there an IT talent shortage? Or is there a clue shortage on the hiring side? Hiring managers put on their perfection goggles and write elaborate job descriptions laying out mandatory experience and know-how that the "purple squirrel" candidate must have. They define job openings to be entry-level, automatically excluding those in mid-career. Candidates suspect that the only real shortage is one of willingness to pay what they are worth. Job seekers bend over backwards to make it through HR's keyword filters, only to be frustrated by phone screens seemingly administered by those who know only buzzwords.
Meanwhile, hiring managers feel the pressure to fill openings instantly with exactly the right person, and when they can't, the team and the company suffer. InformationWeek lays out a number of ways the two sides can start listening to each other. For example, some of the most successful companies find their talent through engagement with the technical community, participating in hackathons or offering seminars on hot topics such as Scala and Hadoop. These companies play a long game in order to lodge in the consciousness of the candidates they hope will apply next time they're ready to make a move.
Meanwhile, hiring managers feel the pressure to fill openings instantly with exactly the right person, and when they can't, the team and the company suffer. InformationWeek lays out a number of ways the two sides can start listening to each other. For example, some of the most successful companies find their talent through engagement with the technical community, participating in hackathons or offering seminars on hot topics such as Scala and Hadoop. These companies play a long game in order to lodge in the consciousness of the candidates they hope will apply next time they're ready to make a move.
The biggest clue shortage on the hiring side is requiring x years of experience with a tool or product that has only been out for less time than they're demanding. I've lost count of the numbers of times I've seen such asinine job posting requirements.
Another good clue shortage is expecting x years with one product, y years with another product, and z years with a third, while specifying that it's an intermediate position. Make up your mind -- either you want someone with only 5 years of experience or you want someone who's spent time with the tools you're requesting -- the two are mutually exclusive!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I just applied for the above job, do you think the companies HR department has any clue?
Basically the job boards are now so useless that your best bet is to start networking in-person with as many local companies as you can. I've already run across some companies that are starting to realize this and host technology meet-ups. While this isn't the best state of affairs, at the very least we might be able to start flushing out some useless HR staff that make it impossible to even interview remotely qualified employees. It'd be funny if this entire process goes full circle and we end up with job postings in classified sections of local papers. That would probably be better than what we have now.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
IT people don't get paid what they think they are worth, invent "crisis" to explain. The man is out to get them, there is a big conspiracy, blah blah blah. The simple fact is, if the position is that important, companies would compensate appropriately to bring in good people. The fact that they are not is all you need to know to tell you that the position is not as important as you think it is. It is easily outsourced and/or replaced, almost by the very nature of the work. Deal with it - the rest of the world did a long time ago.
That if companies paid candidates what the candidates though that they were worth, said companies would go bankrupt.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
There's plenty of crappy coders out there who think they're way better than they really are.
Eight years ago, Ruby Raley and I published (in Cutter IT Journal) an article entitled "The Longest Yard: Reorganizing IT for Success" (you can read it here). Our basic premise is that the current "industrial" model of IT hiring/management -- treating IT engineers like cogs or components -- is fundamentally flawed, and that a model based on professional sports teams would likely work much better. Having spent 20 years analyzing troubled or failed software projects, I believe we need a significantly different approach on hiring and retaining the right IT engineers. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
When you can get H1-B visa workers for peanuts on the dollar? Good business acumen all the way.
If you are simply responding to job postings, you have to play the job posting game. The best jobs and hires I have done have come from a little bit of let work. Find out who the guy "really" doing the hiring is and get an email/phone call/coffee with that guy. 90% of the time, if he likes you, he will get you on the interview list.
Job candidates get paid exactly what they are worth. (Possibly more.)
The job candidate decides whether or not he/she will accept the position at the terms presented.
Employment-at-will means you can leave at any time.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
This fails because it assumes that people in charge of companies are rational decision makers.
Senior software developer here.
We get *lots* of applications from candidates who consider themselves to be senior-level, and have a good 10 years (give or take) of working experience to back that up.
But once we ask them to solve novel problems, they fail. They go on and on about all these sophisticated technologies that they have worked with, and how they integrated them together. But all they can do is integrate other people's solutions together. They cannot cook up solutions of their own (not, at least, if the problem is any more complicated than a simple automation script).
So, we avoid senior level candidates these days. Interviewing them isn't worth our investment of time. We would rather hire a junior level candidate that can actually solve novel problems, and train them up.
The biggest clue shortage on the hiring side is requiring x years of experience with a tool or product that has only been out for less time than they're demanding.
If they're asking for experience from before when it was out, then you need to have worked for the company that produced it. It's a way to disguise poaching.
Well, you get a lot of applicants to any job these days. A lot of people are looking for work. But you need to find appropriate candidates.
You can't hire anyone too young, because they don't have the skills and haven't proven themselves at a real job. You don't want to hire anyone over 35 because the field moves quickly and you don't want someone who doesn't keep up.
You also need people who have the hot skill right now. Ruby used to be really hot, but now we are looking for Python. Can you train a Ruby programmer to be a Python programmer? When you are running a business you can't take the risk to find out!
You're really looking for about five years experience and experience with the right technologies. This doesn't sound to hard, but a lot of these people are asking for outrageous amounts of money!
Furthermore, you need the right cultural fit. At my company, we all wear hoodies. We wouldn't want to hire someone who wears a fleece. We need someone who breathes code. Last week I interviewed someone who was a good match, except he said he swam in code! We had to cut that interview short.
Also, you can't hire people with too much self-esteem. People with self-esteem are always asking if they can be managers and constantly leaving you just because someone offered them more money. So in addition to the exact right amount of experience, in the right field, and cultural fit, you need someone who is a little bit broken that you can build up into your perfect coder.
It is all very difficult. And we are a firm anyone would want to work for. We can only pay $50,000 a year, but you get to work with really cutting edge technologies like Python! So I'm sure if we have difficultly finding the right people, anyone would.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
"For example, some of the most successful companies find their talent through engagement with the technical community, participating in hackathons or offering seminars on hot topics such as Scala and Hadoop. These companies play a long game in order to lodge in the consciousness of the candidates they hope will apply next time they're ready to make a move."
So, you are supposed to work during the day and participate in hackathons during the evening and week ends. These are looking for slaves. I can't believe this is the model someone consider as being successful. Why only in IT this kind of things happen? Do you ask a lawyer to do hackathons? Participate in contests for a slice of pizza and a flat beer? Do IT employees considered people with families, with kids, with a right to do something else not related to computers during the week ends, during the evening? This world is broken.
As a IT prospect, do you respect yourself enough to refuse this kind of slavery?
Achille Talon
Hop!
or there's a huge number of people who interview really terribly.
I wonder how many of these people have an autism spectrum disorder. An interviewer might get so put off by a candidate's lack of superficial social skills that he or she cannot adequately judge the candidate's competency for the job itself.
We just got a million people applying for an IT job. And none of them H1-Bs.
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Like hiring sports teams in what sense? Like the NFL draft? Big companies get to pick who they want from each year's graduating class, with little if any choice on the part of the new-minted engineers, and most of the graduates don't ever get to use their skills professionally?
When we hire we look for specific skills that are relevant to our business. Maybe that's what you mean. We try to be careful about what's an absolute must (e.g. knows C++) and make the rest of the qualifications "preferred" or "desired." We rarely get an exact match between what we'd like to have and the candidate but that's OK. We hire people that can learn.
I am currently searching for a development job and everyone seems to want 3 years experience or 5 years experience. I am seeing "graduate" jobs asking for 2 years commercial experience.
And its impossible to even get your foot in the door because of the "IT Recruitment Firm" who will reject any resume that doesn't match exactly what they are looking for.
If I could just get to the point where someone would actually TALK to me and find out what I can do and just how good I am at writing code, I might have a chance...
I have been in IT for over 25 years and top to bottom it is a complete mess. So yes something has to change otherwise it is just going to get worse.
Treating your IT teams like a football team is a good start but we have to get rid of the clueless idiots at the top and take HR out of the hiring loop. If the person in charge is clueless then so is your operation plan. The only thing HR should be doing is vetting your choices and not filtering them. And quit using software to filter people out to. I would start by adding context to the data your using when managing your teams so you really know what you need and have an idea what the Feck your looking for in a new hire.
getting involved in the tech community should be a given for IT management, but unfortunately the closest I ever see is a manager with a subscription to info world. They might as well just subscribe to a Tech infomercial channel on cable TV.
The truth is every organization is different and no matter if you are a noob, or a veteran you will have the same damn learning curve figuring out what was done before you and how to fix it. That and the Technology changes every 6 months so what you know now has to change with the curve anyway.
And for once pay people what they are really worth to the organization, and treat them with respect & dignity.
There issue fixed
Hell, I worked for over 13 years for a large insurance company that claimed that they couldn't find talent. The job descriptions were so high that I never even qualified for my position!!!
The reason. To be able to say 'NO' to whomever without fear of a discrimination suit, besides hiring Indians for 1/2 of what I'm making.
You don't hire based on the person's stats alone. You don't hire based solely on past performance. You need to hire based on fit and potential. The problem is that the hiring managers and HR can't gauge potential, so they look only at past performance as a gauge for future performance (despite all the disclaimers to the opposite for investments).
Learn to love Alaska
So, as I've been in the market for a few months, I'm finding that many of the jobs that glossed over me a few months ago are coming across again... Whether it be a recruiter contacting me (I remember applying for this a while back), a new posting on the company's job search portal of choice (they changed 5 words in the job description), or even a new approach (look, now they're recruiting from my MBA school for this position)... Needless to say, it's infuriating.
Sure, I recognize that I only have 85% of what you're looking for in terms of a skillset; or that you want to pay $5000/year less than my absolute salary floor... But if that job has been open for 3-6 months, the damage caused by it being open (presumably because someone left, and now there's a void that everyone else on the team is not really able to fill) has far exceeded whatever small training costs or whatever you would have to spend on me...
Another issue is that too many companies are still thinking it's the financial crisis, when new recruits were happy to accept 50% cuts in salary to avoid foreclosure or vehicle repossession. This was best described to me by one recruiter--"three asses, one seat". While I've seen some absolutely batshit JDs (where 2 people in the country might have all of these skills), I recently saw one that pissed me off... A company wanted someone who was a SQL Server DBA/BI stack/TSQL & reporting guru, an Oracle DBA/PL-SQL programmer, and a Linux server manager in downtown Chicago--for $95k/year. Good luck finding such a person, with competing technologies, for less than double that...
Another problem that I'm finding is that some jobs are sub-sub-contracted out. I recently saw one in Chicago that needed expert experience in Informatica MDM. Max pay was $46/hr W2. Turns out that MegaCorp contracted out to CompanyX who opened up to numerous companies, CompanyY contacted me with this max rate, asking me to be an employee of CompanyY. My convo w/recruiter: "So everybody has their hands in the cookie jar, and there's nothing left for the guy who's actually doing the work?--What do you mean?--Well, someone with that skillset should be in the $75-100/hr range, but since 2 levels above want to keep their 100% profit margin, $50 becomes $100 and $100 becomes $200, which MegaCorp is probably being billed somewhere around there..."
Finally, don't get me started on "the foreigners"... It seems the boiler-room stock antics of the '80s and '90s have moved offshore, where in some cases I get calls from multiple people about the same job from the same company... They're all in a feeding frenzy, just trying to be the first to pass along my authorization to represent--never mind that I may not be qualified for the role in question. (One conversation went like this... "Well, where in Chicagoland is the job?--Let me submit you and I'll tell you.--You mean you won't tell me where the job is until I agree to let you represent me? It could be an impossible commute...--I need to submit you first...--Fuck off...")
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
There is no HR any more. That's part of the problem. My first job came from a corporate HR employee who found me online and contacted me directly. Now all the dedicated HR roles are gone with the necessary administrative bits delegated to former secretaries. All the searching for new candidates is outsourced to the idiot recruiters who act like over judgemental gatekeepers to inflate their own sense of value.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I'm getting three to five e-mails and or phone calls a day from headhunters. I'm very senior (30+ years in the business) so I'm not cheap. 2007 through 2010 I couldn't buy a job. What changed is the labor market. It just got a lot tighter. It may not be the dot com days when if you could say computer you got hired but it's looking a lot better.
The last laugh is that a lot of hiring managers and HR dweebs haven't gotten the memo and are still pulling the same old bullshit. If you run into one of those, keep looking. There's someone out there who doesn't need a glass navel to see where they're going.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
IT mgr-- yes there's a hiring shortage! I need a:
Person with 10yrs of experience, work for 50K or $35/hr or less, be on call, even thru 3rd shift, certified [fill in silicon valley company tech], and easy to work with, e.g. not some fresh out of school kid, fluent english, not ready to retire, doesn't have a F/T family, and sane. Also, I need that person to know our domain (apps) like an expert.
IT worker--there are too many IT workers! I want a:
Company that pays be triple figures, flexible work hours for only an 8hr a day. Pays overtime, sends me to certified [fill in silicon valley company tech] training, has respectable customers, willing business analysts. Gives me work-life balance, and sane bosses. Also the customers explain their domain in tech speak so I can easily implement their apps.
Some technology jobs are all about specific skills, but software development is a role that combines the problems of assembly-line work with the problems of research and development, and is a job that requires flexibility and creativity.
Most HR types are only interested in hiring the kind of people who generate the least amount of work for HR, and will never consider candidates with creativity.
Part of HR's role is to keep out people who will cause friction in the workplace or cause lawsuits, but that has to be balanced against the need to hire people actually suited to the job. HR is part of the team and has to take responsibility for calculated risks, not avoid responsibility at any cost. And HR especially has to understand that this is a line of work where cheaper can mean far greater costs in the long (or even medium) term.
These are not real positions. They are non-jobs. There's tons of them. Lots of reasons they exist -- recruiters fishing for resumes to put in their database, ad to satisfy some visa requirement by not finding anyone, internal corporate requirements, etc.
All pack animals imitate their alphas. Our leaders are the best liars in the world. They lie as easily as they breathe. Every single one of them.
This is the example we are given to follow, because this is what brings success.
Honest workers are liabilities. They might out you just like Snowden did. Why in the world would you want people on your team who won't get on board with how you lie to your clients?
The interviews are made impossible to screen out the honest ones, because deceit is the foundation of success in America.
We just recently went though a hiring phase. I had to select & interview candidates for 2 new mid-level developer positions at median salary.
There are so many liars & frauds posing as developers out there. I have no idea how they managed to build the resume provided to us.
One candidate had jQuery experience and didn't know what $() was. Another had CSS and couldn't explain what a selector was or how to change background/forecolor color. So many people claimed CSS3 expertise and had projects with CSS3, but couldn't write css to center an image inside a div.
The worst was a slick salesman like guy that showed off fancy HTML5/JS/CSS3 demos he claimed to have written. I asked him to write javascript to change the color of some text when a button was clicked and he couldn't do it. CSS3 3D transformation demos with whirling/spinning text and shapes; can't even figure out how to find the element with an id...
This is why you can't get hired, too many liars & frauds crowding you out. These guys have fantastic looking resumes, some with masters degrees in CS, but they can't code for shit.
Yes but the important part is that money was transferred to a university somewhere and debt assigned to a student. Universities and the whole concept of higher education for workaday jobs is very flawed and headed into a brick wall at 100MPH.
Managers should be the ones hiring and firing people. HR's job should be managing employee paperwork. The actual task for hiring people should be done by the managers themselves.
Will this mean that hiring practices become much more chaotic and lack uniformity? Yep. Guess what... when you get hired your managers are going to be different and the jobs you're getting hired for are going to be different. So why pretend that the hiring process has to be uniform when the work environments you're applying for are not uniform?
Now some will argue "this will take time from the manager's other jobs etc"... well that means either you don't have enough managers or you're over complicating the process.
Ultimately, the manager should get some face time with whomever is applying for the job. He/she should ask the new potential hire some questions to get to know them... and then go from there.
I seriously don't understand why we even bother with HR in regards to hires? Anyone actually know?
Give department heads budgets for their departments as well as responsibilities they must fulfill by given deadlines. If they're competent they'll work it out. If not then they won't. HR is not doing anything to make that process easier. If anything what they're doing is putting an artificial barrier between the manager and the potential employee. Possibly screening out people the manager might otherwise want to hire.
And if these stupid job apps are just ruses so they can hire someone specific then why even go through that game? Just let the manager hire his friend or whatever. Cut to the chase please and stop polluting job listings with bullcrap jobs that aren't actually open.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
HR BS is one of the reasons I haven't dealt with FTE gigs in a decade. You can make more money in IT being a consulting and at most companies the consulting pimp deals directly with the IT manager. HR is rarely in the loop, often after the contracts have been signed.
The shortage of workers is real but not for the reasons most people think. When I started working as a programer 15 years ago it was pretty common to see interns and college hires in development departments. Then starting in 2001-02 it plummeted. Some bean counter figured out they could hire H1B labor at about the same money as a college hire, why wouldn't you go with the "experienced" candidate. In the last decade i've only seen a handful of college hire programmers.
Ah, but here's the rub, after spending nearly a decade not investing in the next generation of IT they are having a hard time finding resources. This fact did not go unnoticed to the H1B consulting companies. I've actually seen client's jaws drop when WiPro told them they were jumping their rates to well over $100/hr across the board.
As a bright spot I've seen a nice uptick in college hiring at mid cap companies. A lot of them are on-shoring as well after getting burned.
The professional sports model isn't always the best. Ever heard of the Chicago Cubs and their 100+ years of futility?
Can't resist tooting my own horn. These are from my Klein bottle website:
TOPOLOGY CONSULTANT Part-time design of low-dimensional manifolds in glass, wool, plastic, titanium, niobium, pentium, and unobtanium. Ideal candidate is fresh out of college with 20 years experience in applied topology; and can solve Poincare's, Heawood's, and Hodge's conjectures. Pay & benefits are epsilon above unemployment. Compensation package includes trillions in worthless stock options.
GLASSBLOWER Construct borosilicate manifolds using lampwork. Handy with glass lathe, oxy-hydrogen torch, and bandaids. Must know the usual cuss words to describe breaks & cracks. Experienced in minor burn treatment. Special bonus if you know the difference between inside and outside.
MANIFOLD OPERATOR. Curvaceous, conformal Riemannian vector field desires normalized Ricci tensor with nice eigenvalues. Will relocate within proper metric space. No polymorphic permutations, please.
From http://www.kleinbottle.com/job...
Ouch on the age move there. I am in my mid 50s and I will pit my skills up against a 35 year olds any day. But I do take my tradecraft seriously. I try and do at least one pluralsite course per month. Attend at least two dev conferences per year. I am fluent in .NET, iOS, and Java (android).
I have tried the management game, and was a portfolio manager for a couple of years managing $10.2M in projects. I was grumpy, and hated work. I jumped at a greenfield team lead dev project and like a kid back in the playground.
Some of us old guys just like coding...
I have 15 years of experience in Turbo Swift++.NET#
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
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This pretty much matches our experience. We get a few awesome resumes for Admins, but once they come in the door they can't answer trivial questions about areas they claim to know. One guy told us the area he was best in was Exchange; he couldn't even answer basic questions about that. Why go any further? We gave you a chance to choose the domain we would question you in & you couldn't get that right...a few other random questions in other areas covered in his resume confirmed it wasn't just a fluke. Another claimed >5 years network experience, but he didn't do switches or routers, just put Windows boxes on networks; no, he didn't know how to find the IP or route table of a Windows box either...
Plenty of people with 5-10 years experience...few with 1/2 a brain...
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> Candidates suspect that the only real shortage is one of willingness to pay what they are worth.
1) Buy a candidate for what they're worth
2) Sell them for what they think they're worth
3) Great profits are had by all
Your friend looks at this and then looks at you as though you had totally lost your mind. You ask "What's wrong?" He tells you, "Look when I said I was thirsty what I meant is I wanted a non-alcoholic raspberry lime rickey. Of course made with 7-up, not that cheap store brand stuff and of course freshly squeezed limes and definitely Zyrex syrup. What's wrong with you man?"
Two things come to your mind. The first is your friend is kind of an asshole. The second is he isn't that thirsty and should shut the fuck up about how he thinks he's going to die from dehydration.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
There are two fundamental dichotomies that hide under this argument, and they've been going on for years, if not decades.
First, there's the disconnect between large business and small business. Second, there's the disconnect between what people have previously been paid (or their peers have), and what they are actually worth. This is coming from a guy who has hired 5 software developers so far this year, and has 2 slots still available...
A lot of developers are looking at what happens at Google and Microsoft (aside from the layoffs...), and try to use that as a standard when they apply for a position at a 50-person shop in the midwest. This creates an expectation disconnect where someone gets an offer for $65k, but won't take it because they've been convinced by the Internet, their Career Planning & Placement department, or the job postings on career boards, that their skills are worth $90k.
This is an "expectation shortage", and results when there are not enough candidates willing to take the positions that ACTUALLY EXIST. It's all well and good to say that employers are under-paying developers, and looking for cheap labor. But the market does set rates, and the fact is that most software projects away from the coasts just don't support paying developers $120k/year - at least not sustainably.
The second disconnect occurs when people misconstrue what it takes to be hired and promoted in the majority of companies, other than the mega-corporations who can have 200 people doing the same job. The sad fact is that you pretty much have to be a specialist to GET a job, and then you have to be a generalist to KEEP it. The specialists who stay in their pidgeon-hole are always the first against the wall when the next re-org comes. But the generalists who have 75% competency in an array of skill-sets rarely make the cut during interviews, but have enormous job security in their current positions -- though often feel themselves "stuck" in positions where they may not feel like they're advancing quickly enough.
This is a failure of cultivation and and expectation problem on the part of employers. It creates a market distortion where people are encouraged to specialize, and then dumped back onto the market with inflated expectations of their overall worth when that very specialization becomes a liability. (Ruby, anyone...?)
From the inside, I think it's undeniable that there is a shortage of quality, trained developers, with attitudes and ethics that will lead to long-term advancement and quality employment. That doesn't mean that there is a shortage of bodies with the raw skills necessary to do the job. But, in the end, that hardly matters... companies aren't hiring automata, even if some of them want to pay as though they were.
There are ample failures on both sides of the equation, and large companies are exacerbating those problems with their treatment of many H-1Bs and "mass hiring" of fresh graduates (at insanely inflated salaries) who then get culled 9 months later.
But candidates are also making the problem worse by viewing software development as a single, unified market, and clinging to the belief that just because Company X in Boston could afford to pay $x for a given product/project, that their skills are still worth $x when they move to Company Y in Pittsburgh, creating software for a completely different industry.
The end result is a shortage of jobs that don't require specialists to get through the door, and a shortage of employees able to adjust their expectations to the realities of the market we are in. When you meet in the middle, it's a real shortage, regardless of how it came to pass.
Notice: Your mouse has been moved. Windows will now restart so this change can take effect.
Our basic premise is that the current "industrial" model of IT hiring/management -- treating IT engineers like cogs or components -- is fundamentally flawed, and that a model based on professional sports teams would likely work much better.
That's nice. Let me know when you start getting a large number of companies agreeing with you. Part of the whole "keeping down the rank and file" in the wage category is making them believe they are easily replaceable cogs.
The professional sports model isn't always the best. Ever heard of the Chicago Cubs and their 100+ years of futility?
You seem to have confused not winning games for not making their owners more money than any other team out there.
The employers having problems are the ones who want just-in-time employees with just the skill set they need right now. Then they want to dump them when the project is over. Of course they can't get what they want.
Then there's the "full stack DevOps" concept, or one person doing everything, on-call 24/7.
Meanwhile, hiring managers feel the pressure to fill openings instantly with exactly the right person, and when they can't, the team and the company suffer.
The team and company suffer if you hire "because we need someone" and end up with the wrong person. It sucks as an applicant, no denying it, but a bad hire can be toxic to a team or project. They can end up making more work for everyone else.
Complaints about buzzword filtering and what not might be very true, but you have to understand that the hiring manager must never hire just because they need someone.
From the other side, there are MANY "programmers" out there who can't program and certainly have no problem solving skills. Copy/Paste from StackOverflow does not result in working programs.
I'm a "former" developer and current IT hiring manager. I am trying to fill a couple of developer positions. I worked with HR to craft the job description that best described the job opening... Without any crazy years of experience requirements. It is a senior level position though. At any rate, we have received only two qualified candidates in two months. And we have received only four or five resumes so it's not as if we have been weeding out a ton of candidates before interviewing them. One received a promotion from their current employer before we could bring them back for a second interview, the other was asking for almost double what we could have offered plus wanted to telecommute from out of state half the week. We just are not seeing candidates. Where do developers go when they are looking for jobs? Job boards are expensive and we can't afford to hit every one of them.
But if that job has been open for 3-6 months, the damage caused by it being open
.. just like real estate listings that are many months old, it makes everyone wonder if there's some horrible secret as to why that post is still open. Toxic work environment? Horrible hours? Who knows.
Our company keeps jobads for all positons open all the time.
Reason: when the boss fires someone in a snap, there is always a few weeks worth of applications to start looking for the replacement.
$()
Congratulations on piquing my curiosity about something completely ungoogleable. That looks more like a Perl or shell thing than a Javascript thing. What is it, and what does it do?
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
Graduated in 2003. Knowledgeable in Windows, Linux and Cisco. Didn't write any certs. Got hired at a hospital as a "sysoper" in 2004... 90% of the work is tech support, the other 10% is running backups and printing reports. Tried many times to get bumped up to sysadmin. They want someone with 5+ years experience. Can't get experience if they won't give me a fair chance. Paying the money to re-train and write my certs probably isn't worth it, because what they really want is to hire foreigners or Microsoft castaways who will play nicely with upper management.
The operations and desktop support groups is under-staffed and over-trained. Every couple months we're hiring a new project manager for some random webapp that management thinks we need. We have like 5 different brands of EMR software that all do the same thing, with more coming in the next year or two.
I should have taken that sysadmin job for Yahoo in 2009. Didn't want to move from Ontario to California though.
http://search.dilbert.com/comi...
And, of course, you fail to comprehend why this is the case.
The reality is that the people you really want probably dont have a degree. They probably dont have the exact skillset you want, but can easily attain it, given half the chance.
You create an iron-curtain that is rigorously enforced by a computer to pre-screen your applicants, "Because there are so many out there!", which REAL computer experts and programmers understand perfectly well, and KNOW that they will be systemically excluded before they can even talk to you-- the actual person at the other end of that dark tunnel-- Leaving only the people that outright lie, cheat, and plagiarize other people's work that make it through your filter.
Rather than realize that your filter is an effective tool at concentrating charlatans and liars, and not an effective tool at concentrating actual talent-- then making the appropriate action, you instead conclude that there are too many charlatans and liars!
It boggles the mind!
"But they have these really attractive resumes and degrees!"
Seriously.
I thought that was SOP for government contractors. This sort of overhead makes the contractor very rich for the trivial task of submitting a metric fuck-load of paperwork. US politicians are surprised the employee "doing the work" can't afford health insurance. Then everybody brags about 'small government'.
first they hire non-xp people because xp-ppl are too expensive. then you get xp and want more money... BAM! FIRED! rince and repeat. then there's this special place called "game development"... you know that's where the really good developers do a labour of love... in 80 hour crunches for a year. then they die of a heart attack...
not to mention that everyone wants to hire lone hero rock stars... that are only comprised of the top of the top 1%... everyone else is just SHIT and doesn't deserve a job. much less payment.
this industry is FUCKED beyond recognition.
Hiring someone (as a regular, W2) employee in the United States is a tremendous risk. Just look at all the social problems illustrated in the following comments, and you can see how quickly an HR hiring manager's spider sense starts to tingle about a talented software specialist, with some obvious social "issues."
In every company, and government organization, I've worked in, they will sit with positions empty, forgoing business and running their shops so fast and hot that people burn out, rather than take the risk of hiring a talented weird-o that will result in a lawsuit, dealing with increases in unemployment insurance, or EEOP federal focus.
This principle is one reason that makes contractors so valuable. They are not "protected" employees, and do not act on the behalf of the company they are working for (legally) despite being much more expensive than employees. I also believe this is a huge draw to hiring non-US workers (and they are inexpensive.)
$()
Congratulations on piquing my curiosity about something completely ungoogleable. That looks more like a Perl or shell thing than a Javascript thing. What is it, and what does it do?
I am not the original AC, nor do I know JQuery. However, I was also curious, and according to a related item, it is shorthand for $( document )
Why are we still dealing with obviously clueless HR and witless recruiting agencies?
If you want to make this job market thing work, you need to be a little discerning both in what you can do (actively train up to be worth something) and in whom you offer to work for. That means not talking to recruitment agencies at all, and walking away if HR turns out to be small shell script-driven buzzword filters.
Yes, ten other candidates where you came from. Twenty employers where they came from. Show some spine.
If you cannot make or produce anything, you'll have to be the one who hires people who can make something. So HR staff is inherently unqualified - that's why they work in HR.
Recruiters are paid to be judgemental, it's how they make a living, most of those I have met over the last 25yrs have actually been former software developers or network techs who wanted a career change.
There's no point taking a string of job rejections personally, that attitude will inevitably lead to the misery of self-pity which in turn makes it harder to get a job.. If there are jobs available and you* keep getting knocked back then it would seem to me "you're doing it wrong", have you considered finding out why they are rejecting you and fixing it? Most recruiters will offer free advice, especially if you make their short list - but that won't happen until you stop looking at them like they are idiots put there to stop you getting the job. And don't say "what did I do wrong" use a less confrontational manner, something like "how can I better my chances next time a job like this comes up".
*you - the royal version.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Yep, true, and currently they do not even realize I am not so keen in talking with them up front if they do not go ahead with a real job descript.
If depends on the culture too. It would help to tell us which part of the world you are coming from. Some cultures do tend to overrate what they do and have the we can do it all approach and make bullshit all along, others do not.
The problem is that the hiring managers and HR can't gauge potential, so they look only at past performance as a gauge for future performance
False. They only look at specious claims of past performance. It's not like they're actually qualified to determine who is qualified for the position. They're just chair monkeys who point at the screen and make eeping noises when they read "5 years of experience"
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Our company keeps jobads for all positons open all the time.
Reason: when the boss fires someone in a snap, there is always a few weeks worth of applications to start looking for the replacement.
That should be illegal. You're wasting the time of people who desperately need to spend that time gainfully. You are Bad People. I hope you go out of business.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Hence the facebook profile inspection weirdness becoming a mainstream part of recruiting instead of just an excuse for lazy HR folks to waste time on facebook. There are actually losers who will exclude potential employees based on their posts, so don't let those dickheads anywhere near an online presence that shows you drinking, partying or spending time on a hobby that may be considered frivolous or even geeky.
I think you've been very lucky.
I'm 64 and still working freelance, nearly every day I get emails that are orthogonal to my skill set. For example, I've never been a tester and it's not on [and never has been] my cv, but I get emails for testing jobs.
That's apart from the over-specified buzzword bingo related to web CMSs and frameworks. For example, someone that's pretty good with Drupal [not me] can probably deal with Joomla after a week or two.
My main niche is Perl but I did an MSc project in Java, so I can read it and do elementary maintenance programming. But sometimes I see Java/Perl/Ruby/C#/bash specified in the same ad, makes you -really- wonder about the architectural choices going on in that shop, doesn't it?
To be honest, with honourable exceptions [you know who you are] most of the ones I've met seemed to have started their lives as estate agents [that's real estate brokers in the US] or car salespeople.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
After many years in the industry, and being in both sides of the fence, I think I already saw it all. From bitchy interviewers, to clueless ones, to the inexperience and naive, to the mechanical ones that are just there to make a tick on the requirements, to the bureaucratic ones...The most efficient HR process I have ever witnessed was Amazon, where the actual techies are interviewing, and they are typically nice too. The best interviewer I ever met, was only by skype and was like a friend when talking (no, no illusions there, but the guy was really good). The best ever single hire call I had was a brit guy that seemed to be on a rant after a couple of beers, but extremely nice and attentive. The more nice approach again by other brit. The worse interviews I had where collectively from Gibraltar, they seem to be lost, do not know what they want, their job descripts are totally mixed up, often they seem to want it all, a jack of all trades who knows nothing, and to top if off, they often offer less than you are earning. The worst interview of all was by a medical company, cynical HR corporate bimbo who asked me what I was doing there as I already had a nice job. On the other side of the fence, I met everything, specially when interviewing for entry level helpdesk people, from the naive guy that was the expert on the field because he installed linux at home, from the Indian with lots of credentials and certifications who could not answer the more basic questions, to the guy that came to the interview high on drugs, or the nice lady who did not know what she wanted to do for a living and was there just because the job was nice.
Problem 1: you have to pay the people in training a salary, matching or exceeding what they got in their last job. Otherwise they will not come onboard. It is a long term investment.
Problem 2: engineers tend to leave after 2-3 years, partially because there is little room to give them raises after a while.You already have to pay through the nose to get them to begin with! And it takes 2-3 years to get them productive in narrow fields.
Hence: it is a waste of time and money to train engineers. It is far far far more desirbale to hire one who is productive from day 1.
Some companies just have unrealisitci expectations.
I was interviewed for a contract job at least 6 months ago. I didn't succeed. Okay I did appalingly at the interview. Still, the skillset is fairly common. This ia a GUI/media role based on Qt. A pretty easy to use toolkit and fairly well known. UI development is a pretty common skillset, and the crossover with media development is fairly large, unless they want a compression specialist to develop new codecs (unlikely)
They're still advertising the position! The daily rate has been inching up over time so they're offering 50-100% above the going rate for UI/Qt stuff, but I can't work out what it is they want. I don't think they know.
HR won't let us hire someone without a degree for this position. You cannot get above a certain paygrade without a degree. It doesn't matter how good you are or who you know. No degree = no hiring/raise/promotion. This was handed down from our parent corporation in europe.
Yes I'd also like to see an accomplished inventor turn up on their own initiative in response to a simple job advertisement instead of having to go looking for them or do some sort of deal other than give them a small chance at a job, but I don't ever expect it to actually see it happen.
And THAT, is your problem.
Never mind that by the numbers, the actual top A+ talent does not fall into the "Has prestigious 4 year degree!" demographic.
(And that those who DO go the 4 year degree route, often have oppressive student debts, and cannot accept low-ball salaries.)
There isn't a shortage of talented prospects.
There's a shortage of invisible pink unicorns.
That's why you get such a large number of frauds-- You only accept applicants that claim to be both invisible, AND pink, AND are unicorns.
"A company wanted someone who was a SQL Server DBA/BI stack/TSQL & reporting guru, an Oracle DBA/PL-SQL programmer, and a Linux server manager in downtown Chicago--for $95k/year. Good luck finding such a person"
This is fast becoming the norm in the UK. Even Support positions want DBA & Unix Sys Admin backgrounds at entry level salaries
Not too long ago I saw a job listing that required experience with various programs, one of which was five years, unfortunately that program had only been available for a bit less than 3 years.
I think that as an employee your best and most efficient chance of finding a job or at least getting to a decent interview is through word of mouth from your friends, or your "network", if you are one of those people. You will get inside info on the company and its culture way before you even apply and this should give you a great feel whether you should or should not apply.
Before you get your pitchforks out because "omg nepotism!" let me tell you about the advantages for the employer side: great quality applications without wasting too much time and resources. Good IT folks typically know a whole bunch of other good people who would make a great and natural fit for the company. And your buddy "vouching" for you also means that employers might be more willing to invest in you and get you up to speed with their often ridiculous requirements It can also be beneficial for the culture and atmosphere at work because you get like minded people.
I think that if you are just more or less blindly applying through the official channels, you are already doing it wrong. The HR drones have only gotten worse. Be in a position where either potential employers come to you or you know folks on the "inside". This, of course, requires that you are a great employee and can live up to the expectations. Then it is a win-win for both sides.
If you are just starting out your two best options to get into that position are either through your studies or, duh, work. Choose a university and courses that involve real, actual projects with actual organizations. These will be the most long-term valuable hours you will ever spend in your academic life. Talk to the professors, see if any companies are posting jobs or looking for cooperation.
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
Why do companies use clueless recruiters anyway? The development team need to be involved in recruitment. I once had a recruiter ask me if XML was a program I wrote.
Recuiter here (in UK) I have done IT recruitment for 21 years and what Ihave seen is HR trying to automate their jobs using filters etc so I prefer to work with smaller firms where HR is either part of someones job or even non existant so I can talk to the manager and find out what they really want. I am not a coder (unless you cound decades old Sinclair Basic) but I do look after our CentOS server, MySQL based CRM package and keep the Windows clients happy and like to think I can at least talk sensibly with candidates and clients.
For dev roles a few of my clients have short tasks they like to set of candidates to pre-sift out wannabe's and look at peoples approach to problems but you would be amazed the number of people so full of themselves that they say "i don't have time to do all these silly tests I know I am good and if they want me they should just meet me" - surely a few mins in an evening doing a short task to help decide whether it is worth taking time off work for an interview has got to make sense.
I've never ever met an HR person who'd been anything else.
It's "we" that has a royal version, "you" can be singular or plural anyway.
That's apart from the over-specified buzzword bingo related to web CMSs and frameworks. For example, someone that's pretty good with Drupal [not me] can probably deal with Joomla after a week or two.
Same for version numbers, too! You have experience with AIX 5.2, Solaris 10, Red Hat Enterprise 5, but the ad asks for AIX 6.0, or Solaris 8 or Red Hat Enterprise 4.5...well chances are, you can handle the job with just a few adjustments, but the HR won't select your resume unless you have those listed as well.
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
It's the same thing as JQuery(). It searches through the DOM for any elements that match the provided selector and creates a new jQuery object that references these elements. Here's a very simple example:
$("div > p").css( "border", "1px solid gray" );
finds any div wrapped paragraphs and puts a solid gray line around them. Docs here: http://api.jquery.com/jquery/.
-- $G
I did an engineering undergrad ten years ago. To get first class honours in that course, I had to be able to derive the governing equations for a Weiner Filter from first principles, derive the Eb/No curves for a bunch of different modulation strategies, and understand the effect of LU decompositions on matrix calculations with limited precision machines. In my spare time I taught myself how to program PIC microcontrollers because it was fun and easy.
When I went into work, all I did was program microcontrollers and write documentation. Then when I went to change jobs, people would freak out that perhaps I might not understand the CAN bus because I had only done SPI/I2C and USB. It is a mind numbing experience dealing with, frankly, lazy ignorant fools.
I've realised the really smart people do understand this, and they don't work in tech. What they do is come up with schemes to make money from other people's stupidity. This is called investment banking, and the prospects for it have never been better. So if you are a tech person complaining about the situation in tech then you are just a sucker. Those with IQ and EQ haven't been going into that bozo farm for years now.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think the #1 thing that's overlooked is that most software jobs seem to be in the most crowded, highest cost of living areas in the USA. To live in a place like that takes a certain kind of person, and that kind of person is usually not a software developer. I'd rather not be a software developer than live in NY, DC, Chicago, SF/Silicon Valley, etc. So you have a group of companies all trying to poach the same people from each other. There is a finite, limited number of people who want to live in these areas and work in the "software industry". So you have all these recruiters trolling places like LinkedIn with jobs that require relocation, and no one wants them. Anyone who wants to be in places like Silicon Valley is either already there or looking to relocate.
We were somewhat specialized, doing HPC work at a Major East Coast University but lots of other Linux skills. Due to the size of our university, we paid fairly well but HPC is a relatively small market that really does require a wide skillset (we also offered web hosting, database hosting, application installs, etc.). I couldn't get much coaching from HR as they had no idea what we were doing, and IT management had no idea what we were doing either, so we just kept using the same basic job posting every time something came up. A few hires we never filled because we were way too picky (I'll admit that much), but others applying for jobs just seemed to be throwing their resumes around wherever they could and hoping that the collection of buzzwords in their resume matched the collection in the posting.
It didn't help that HR was run by a bunch of nitwits that outsourced the online HR process to a company that couldn't give you a nice URL to a specific job posting. You had to go to a site, enter the job code, then you could see it. Then you had to create an account and then upload your resume. How the people spewing resumes everywhere did it, I have no idea. But I'm sure we missed out on a lot of candidates because it was difficult to find the job, let alone apply for it.
Of the people I did hire, most were really good and worked out well. I made candidates meet with my team and other IT teams just to chat and see what they thought of each other, and they reciprocated and asked my team to interview their candidates.
For me, the worst are those agencies that act like the narrator from the Stanley Parable. By submitting your CV/resume to their job adverts you automatically get subscribed to their mailing lists. Then when you try and unsubscribe, you get hit with a blizzard of love-bombing: "Why are you leaving us? We've done so much in the past year to set up this website and customize it for you. What have we done wrong? Tell us. We'll make it better. Please reconsider, you may not get a second chance. Just one more time, give it another week. We'll give you a free month of premium service. Think of all the opportunities you'll be missing out on. Just this once. Please.... We've done so much together..."
Like hiring sports teams in what sense? Like the NFL draft? Big companies get to pick who they want from each year's graduating class, with little if any choice on the part of the new-minted engineers, and most of the graduates don't ever get to use their skills professionally?
When we hire we look for specific skills that are relevant to our business. Maybe that's what you mean. We try to be careful about what's an absolute must (e.g. knows C++) and make the rest of the qualifications "preferred" or "desired." We rarely get an exact match between what we'd like to have and the candidate but that's OK. We hire people that can learn.
The All-American institution NFL is rather socialist, actually. Unlike pro baseball, the richest team doesn't get all the marbles, because of salary caps and the draft ordering process that says that the teams with the worst previous-season record get preferred picks. There's a also a quite respectable minimum salary just for being on the team at all.
Baseball comes in tiers. If you don't make the majors, you still might find something on one of the farm team levels, You earn progressively less as you go down, but then we like to claim the USA is a meritocracy.
And yes, we all know that there are some people who deserve to wash out. People are not all equally suited and it's better for the marginal cases to look for something they'd be better at.
Seriously. The whole concept of business organization is stuck in the factory mentality of 200 years ago. People aren't interchangeable cogs and business needs to stop considering them as such. Cogs don't care about the business any more than business cares about the individual cogs.
Sports teams aren't the only alternative model that could be considered - after all Fred Brooks suggested a surgical team organization back in the 1960s. But the world is on the brink of major changes and we need to consider all the possibilities we can.
As mentioned by Greyfox - low quality recruiters are a pain. Some who struggle to communicate, others who can't function without incessant phone calls. On the company side, there's an unwillingness to pay for experience (I've seen job postings for "senior" positions that pay junior rates). I've had plenty of phone screens with someone who has no idea what they are talking about, but even with skilled engineers who know how to code, but not how to ask technical questions relevant to the job they are hiring for!
One of the more frustrating things is the "full stack" creep. Full stack used to mean someone who could write server code and front end code. Now it also means being a sysadmin, a dba, an architect, a ux guy, and in some cases even a designer. I've seen companies hiring an entire tech department in one job description.
There's also where the office is located. Allow remote workers! If you're in Boston, hire people in New York, New Hampshire, etc. They can come in every so often for essential "face time", but code like crazy for you and in the same timezone.
The professional sports model isn't always the best. Ever heard of the Chicago Cubs and their 100+ years of futility?
You seem to have confused not winning games for not making their owners more money than any other team out there.
The Cubs exist primarily to provide satisfaction for people who think that life is a losing game.
If they ever went to the Series, it would be pandemonium.
Our basic premise is that the current "industrial" model of IT hiring/management -- treating IT engineers like cogs or components -- is fundamentally flawed, and that a model based on professional sports teams would likely work much better.
That's nice. Let me know when you start getting a large number of companies agreeing with you. Part of the whole "keeping down the rank and file" in the wage category is making them believe they are easily replaceable cogs.
AH yes, but the Libertarian approach says that you stand up and tell them that you are not. That you have a proven record of excellence. And that you'll refuse to accept their puny offerings. Which, in the spirit of true market arbitration will cause them to reconsider.
(cue laughter)
The disadvantage (as seen most clearly with autocratic governments but it also applies to companies) is that if say your multinational company has executives drawn from the same University swimming club it ends up no better run than a University swimming club. You end up with the shallow end of the gene pool instead of having a widespread bunch of people who are capable of running the place. It can happen at any scale and it tends to drive away anyone you can catch who may be talented but isn't one of the "in crowd".
The Boss:
, 1. reads the Steve Jobs eulogy and thinks, "Scream at Engineers, make outragous demands, close door, smoke pot = Profit!"
2. "wants the best and brightest minds available" to create a "new" web site.
3. wants years and years of experience for a 30 day, 1099 contract.
4. says it pays the industry average, for college grads.
5. knows that outsourcing is the only way to "keep a competitive advantage, in America."
What really helps is the "Golden Rule" applied to Congress.
The company where I work has grown from about 15 when I started to around 50. Not everyone is technical, of course, but the technical staff has grown from maybe 5 to 15, give or take. The company's interviewing strategy is terrible in terms of accurately gauging ability and talent. Consequently, the quality of technical employees has been hit or miss. There are a few very competent people and a few that absolutely should never have been hired. The company pays roughly industry standard for its geography. Given that it absolutely had to hire technical staff, had the interviewing process had been effective at weeding out sub-standard candidates then the company would likely have been forced to offer above-market compensation in order to increase head count while maintaining a reasonable level of competence.
There's may not be a shortage of candidates per se, but there's a shortage of competent candidates and a shortage of wisdom (on the part of employers) in how they choose whom to hire.
I suspect a small company that did a top-notch job of screening candidates would enjoy a significant advantage over its competition.
The HR people aren't qualified to make such a judgment. If your organization is reasonably structured, the hiring managers are very qualified to judge the competence of the candidates and in the typical process, they make sure they are interviewed by several people with varying skill sets relevant to the position. Those people are qualified to judge some or all of the candidate's relevant skills.
That is, if you get to the real interviews at all. Most candidates are screened out by HR because they don't even meet the job description on paper. The hiring manager doesn't want to look at 100 resumes for a position, most of which are for people who don't have the skills they're looking for. She wants to look at 5 to ten, pick the most likely 3 and have them in for on-site interviews. That right there is the value that hiring managers see in HR people. They'd rather have a semi skilled person do a half assed job of screening the resumes so their choices are narrowed to something reasonable even if it means the best person for the job will get screened out. At the end of the hiring process, it doesn't MATTER if you've found the best person for the job. It only matters if you find SOME person who can do the job and can function well in your working environment. Typically, it's a sooner-the-better situation. Work that you need done is not getting done because there aren't enough people with the right skills to do it.
In order for company's to hire cheap labor from outside the country they have to prove that no citizen of the US can do the job. So they write rediculous job desciptions so that no US worker will be able to meet them. Then they can get around the law and hire foreign workers and pay them much less.
Everyone knows this congress, fix the loop hole!!!!!
While the public facing human resources people may be clueless, the hiring process is anything but clueless. The hiring process select for candidates that are con artists. At a fundamental level this is because the people who are creating the hiring process are con artists.
Seastead this.
That is, if you get to the real interviews at all. Most candidates are screened out by HR because they don't even meet the job description on paper.
A job description which, as has been discussed elsewhere in this thread, has been tampered with by HR — often to the point that no one can appear to fulfill the requirements without lying.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Especially more competent than my linking skills.
I didn't think a spurious space at the beginning of a URL would be that bad, who knew. I mean, before the protocol even.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's not fair, that poster didn't specify what [s]he asked for, merely what they got in response. All things being said, though, any job where you have to penetrate such an iron curtain to get a job probably isn't worth the grief.
"Pearl" developer == can take an irritating grain of sand and polish it until is has a shiny luster.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
never saw a Purple squirrel ,
I never hope to see one;
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I'd rather see than be one
apologies to Gelett Burgess.
Ah, yes, I wrote the "Purple squirrel"â"
I'm Sorry, now, I wrote it;
But I can tell you Anyhow
I'll Kill you if you Quote it!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Well considering that I do entertain most job offers I get and have laughed at most of them I have been doing my part. The worst offer was for a senior level position doing similar work to what I currently doing but was in a higher cost shitty area. The pay offered was $35,000 a year, I laughed at that offer and the recruiter seriously thought it was good until I told her I make over 2.5x that now and live in a lower cost, nicer area. When asked what it would take to get me out there I told her a quarter million a year, and mentioned the 2x cost of living, and that I doubt that I would be able to afford a house comparable to what I have, .5 acre plot that backs up to a 10 acre wooded park in the best school district in the state, on less that that amount. Add in that I would have forfeited half of my 401k because I wasn't vested at that point and that my wife would have been without a job for the rest of the school year and businesses need to make real offers instead of the joke ones.
I always let recruiters and companies know why I turn down offers. Especially when it would be making huge steps backwards.
Time to offend someone
The reason people ask for this is because there are lots of applicants out there who had a stint working before getting an advanced degree. They've been exposed to the workplace and will have the basics of how to show up for a job, be respectful of others, not be a gigantic loser down. People who have never had a job have to be potty trained and it's pretty expensive (and takes a lot of management time), for what?
$ is just an alias for the jQuery function, which is the "selector" at the heart of the jQuery philosophy.
I don't have a sig.
Absolutely clueless, the whole lot of them. Yet most companies only hire using them.......
It is not as HR are/were the brightest bulbs. A secretary is probably smarter than them.
I do not maintain an open facebook profile, and only add people I know and family. Past and present co-workers, linked.in.
Sounds like some org trying to switch from Java to C# mono.
Position: Associate Software Development Engineer I
Education: BS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, MS Strongly Preferred
Experience: 0-2 years
Qualifications:
Seeking a candidate for an entry-level position as a software development engineer. The ideal candidate has a proven track record of success developing database interfaces for data conversion between SQL, Oracle, and open source databases such as MySQL. Preference given to candidates with advanced expertise in database design and architecture, programming in C/C++, Perl, Python, and shell scripting, in addition to GUI design for open source visual platforms such as Gnome and Unity.
Candidate must have excellent organizational skills as well as verbal, and written communication skills.
====
Yeah... talk about a clueless hiring manager.
It appears I shouldn't have used the word "you". It was a general comment to anyone browsing on what people wishing to be hired should do since now HR in a lot of places are starting to sort based on whether they approve of what they can find out about people's social lives online - don't give the pricks anything to object to (just as was written above about not having the profile open - good idea).
The old "cyber-safety" line was never give anyone your real name unless you have contact with them offline - facebook taught a generation the opposite. When you have potential employers that would reject you in preference for other based on even just a list of the fiction recently read it's better to not let them get anything via that channel, and to do their jobs properly.
Enough ranting I suppose but I've had HR people wasting far too much time looking up people on facebook trying to find trivial things to sort on instead of actually doing their job and finding potential hires who know how to use a computer - why should I give a shit if they like line dancing or whatever?
That post is apparently self-proving. TOO much effort ...
Previous company's "low bar" used to be "When would you turn on circular logging and why?"
Three-quarters of the answers were complete failures by L3 system engineer interviewees.
A further 15% kind of knew...
Depressingly, a good two-thirds were in a similar L3 position at the time.
We didn't even require graduates, since we'd found it suited those who used braindumps and it wasn't a guarantee of intelligence.
What we found was good all-round L3's were some other companies backbone or their understudy, would self-teach to fill in knowledge gaps, and/or had a home lab.
Unfortunately, management never responded to prospective employees in time and successive suitable applicants were snapped up by other companies - rightly so.
The process opened my eyes to what I was worth, and I didn't find my replacement before it was time to move on...
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
Employer's job: Get as much work out of an employee for as little pay as possible.
Employee's job: Get as much money out of an employer for as little work as possible.
You get hired or you hire when there's a compromise between the two positions. It gets out of balance and the agreement is terminated.
Is the apology because the original piece(s) of doggerel were about a purple COW?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
One of the biggest problems I see in the software development industry right now is that there are too many ways to implement the same thing. Are you a windows shop? Linux ?. Are you using C++,Java,C#,Python (Yick) Visual Basic (LOL), Groovy (YEA), MySQL, YourSQL, TheirSQL NOSQL. Windows Forms ,WPF. Ajax, Windex. WSDL, JSON, Jenkins, TFS. Git, Svn. Give me a friging BREAK !!!!!
How this all started (starts) ...
So basically, some idiot savant at some company who knows a little about how to sling code and a little more about what the business needs are, stays up for 2 two weeks straight (because he has no life, or wife) and slaps together a proof of concept (using whatever software tools he can get to work for him, NOT you), which marketing sees and then sh*ts their pants over, and then sells as a product to some unfortunate customer(z).
As the bugs start flowing in. (Some bugs are actually feature requests) and the savant bails the company since he's not a production coder and can't be bothered with actually getting his "baby" to work (oh and now, he has a new set of skillz to flaunt and a new start-up to get seed money for) the dev manager screams and cries to management in order to get some developers that can help out with all the bugs and new features (or features that were originally promised in the first place that customers are actually paying for).
So now you have a software dev job requirement list with a nice fat "Frankenstein Factor" that no "one" developer can actually qualify for. This puzzles management and makes them realize it's going to take an army of developers who are specialized in each "piece" of the monster. In reality the "monster" should be taken apart and put back together with software technology and tools that the majority of developers on the planet can handle in one sitting but management balks at this request since there is no money in the software budget to "refactor" the code.
Besides any money left over after managements "bonuses" for the year must got to the guy who sits up in Washington and tells who ever will listen that "we don't have enough qualified" (ie. cheap labor drones that are thankful to just keep Frankenstein "ALIVE") software developers so please raise the H1B visa cap. Pretty Please !!! (oh and here's some money).
To many options. To many languages to learn. Can't build off of what you already know since technology shifts in the industry making existing solutions obsolete.
Awesome, the companies are learning to market themselves. How unhelpful.
In any corporation, workers are just another capital expense. It is delusional to see yourself as any different to your employing corporation than the chair your ass is in. Both are seen as replaceable cogs, the corporate machinery will continue to chug along with or without you.
As some point, software engineers will need to accept that this is a tradesmen profession and we are fools to ignore history.
Every employer forces you to sign a contract upon hire.
Until we have our own contract, we will always be on the losing side of negotiations. We need a guild, a union, whatever you want to call it. We need representation if we ever hope to be treated as the tradesmen we are.
Is 23 years old and has 8 years experience in a 1 year old technology willing to relocate 3,000 miles away to live in one of them most expensive zipcodes in America for near minimum wage for a job that's 120 hrs a week and will be thrown away after the next beta goes to production. Oh and by the way, the job was filled 2 weeks before the posting went up because the hiring manager is already fucking the candidate.
Within the past 15 years I've designed and developed three successful data warehouses, designed a major product information system and recently cleaned up and successfully installed a major insurance system. I've got 50 years in the business.
And I can't think of a single word I can put on a resume which would interest an HR person or a Hiring Manager.
I got my engagements from people on my network. Unfortunately, at my age they've all retired or died.
I don't remember I've hired anyone screened by HR. HR requires the job description and skill set written down in a way they could digest. When I hire people, I'm less concern about people's skill matching what's on the job description, but more concern about the person's knowledge in general, ability to adapt to changing environment, and whether a fit to the group. I don't know how to write these criteria down in the job description.
I intentionally created really detailed job description/requirements which I don't think HR could find anyone matches the requirements. To my surprise, they found 2 individuals which their skill-sets on their resumes match the requirements.
Not all libertarians!
I think I'm allergic to Perl. Every time I see it, I have violent fits of sneezing.
Solution 1: quit being a cheapass. Solution 2: quit being a cheapass.
If you can't afford to do the above, you deserve to go out of business.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You don't know the facts behind the postings. We are hiring multiple developers, that doesn't mean that we post a separate ad for each person we are willing to hire. The companies in question may have hired 10 people already but are still looking for more under the same job description. You assume that all the blame lies with the employers, but if you didn't get picked for those positions there may be some reason for that. It's at least something you need to consider...
It's a big game in just about every field, but the IT field is experiance driven.
Experianced IT people sometimes get 5 job offers a year. It's not degree driven because universities can't keep up with the speed of which the technology changes.
If you have been in the field as long as I have (30 years), you should apply for IT jobs you have no intention of taking. I do this from time to time, and when they offer me a job, and offer a little $40,000 per year, I respond by saying I need $150,000. When they ask if I am worth $150,000, I tell them "No, I'm worth $200,000, but as long as I get 12 paid holidays, 4 weeks paid vacation, my own office, my own reserved parking space, and full medical and dental, then $150,000 will be fine for now."
Sometimes after that, they complain that it's not a job that pays that kind of money, and I respond by saying "Your advertisement called for somebody with experiance, and the kind of money you are offering will only get somebody just starting out in the field".
Of course they will not hire you after that, but then you can walk back to the lobby where the other applicants are waiting, and tell them exactly what you demanded. At the very least, they may up their own requirements, and that may help hinder the attempts to drive down our pay.
But you've made your job that much harder... Think about it. Trying to save a few bucks by merging x-number of available jobs into one job post, where you don't make it obvious that you're hiring for multiple people where each needs SOME of the skills (which you probably can't do because of job site ToS--they probably require you to post each job as one post), you're confusing many of your applicants into thinking you're looking for a "batshit crazy" skillset. Look at the other replies above--most people think that a crazy list of skills under one post is for one insane & underpaid job.
Even the best candidates for a specific skillset wonder "what up with this role?", and you don't hear from them...
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
http://www.w3schools.com/jquery/jquery_syntax.asp
Companies pay what the market will bear. Unfortunately, it's been a race to the bottom when you add in the H1-Bs. If everyone in IT walked off the job there would be some serious salary and wage adjustments. And that's the other problem. Good IT people are individuals, and don't really play well to a group idea unless that's the nature of the job.
. . . shitting me? Why not the Liberty Lobby, Ken Rogoff or Martin Feldstein, they all share equal "validity" and "credibility."
I agree it should be, however there is no method for correcting this, no oversight of not hiring someone for a publicly posted job position.
The fact that such fake jobs are listed probably helps job listing sites in similar ways to that 'Virtual Cupid' scam various online dating sites have been found guilty of.
There is definitely a shortage of senior people who really have a clue. Everyone I know that I would ever recommend hiring, already has a job and they have jobs at "A" companies. The companies really having trouble getting "A" people are the "C" companies. Companies are going to have to stop writing off everyone that failed to get back on the horse immediately after the recession ended. Companies are going to have to give young people a chance to enter the industry and actually help them develop. When everyone outsourced every job they could to offshore vendors in 2003-2010, they killed the pool of candidates for the long term. Many of those workers who had a ton of experience left and never came back. Many of those young workers never got the chance to develop into senior workers. Companies now want nobody with less than 8-10 years experience yet there aren't enough "A" or even "B" players that entered the industry at that time. More H1-Bs is only a cop-out to bandage a systemic problem that business doesn't know how to hire, develop and retain people to maintain the pipeline.
Never mind that by the numbers, the actual top A+ talent does not fall into the "Has prestigious 4 year degree!" demographic.
Requiring a degree when a candidate has a provable track record and skills is a stupid, misguided policy. But so is pretending they are inherently superior. There are plenty (almost definitely more "by the numbers") excellent engineers with degrees (though not all CS nor engineering at all).
But you seem to be implying that those without degrees are inherently more qualified, which is just as bad an assumption as implying the opposite.
It should also be understood by anyone looking for an IT job that certain types of listings are quite clearly designed to find no qualified candidates, or at least no qualified US citizen candidates. Why would they want to do this you ask? Simple. The H1-B visa requirements include posting the job in publications of record or on job boards for a period of time before an application can be made to bring in a foreigner on an H1-B visa. By crafting the language of the job posting to eliminate all US citizens who apply, regardless of qualifications, they're looking to fulfill the requirements of the laws without actually finding anyone in the US to hire. Whenever I see postings like this, I know two things straight away. First, it's a complete waste of time to apply for that job and second, anybody who would resort to that sort of chicanery is cheap, duplicitous and not worth working for anyway.
Illegal? Moron.
It's no more illegal or immoral than the tens of millions of people out there who are currently employed but are sending out their resumes speculatively.
And it's not like they are interviewing people, as that would waste even more time on the company's side. How much time does it take anyone to email a resume these days, anyway? Almost none. And after doing so, they now actually have a resume on file with the company in case there is an opening in the future. Which is the whole fucking POINT.
But if that job has been open for 3-6 months, the damage caused by it being open (presumably because someone left, and now there's a void that everyone else on the team is not really able to fill) has far exceeded whatever small training costs or whatever you would have to spend on me...
Sorry, I disagree here. Technical lead here who has trained about 1/3 of my current department (50 people or so). It takes about 6 months to get you ramped up, 12 months until you are self-sufficient, and 24 months until you can really start contributing back to the team. The cost of leaving the position open for another few months is far less than the lost time we'll suffer if we hire the wrong candidate - or worse, somebody who comes on board and jumps ship because they find they really don't like the work and just wanted a job of some sort.
We have two open positions right now and I am reviewing every single resume that comes in (no HR filter). I can tell in 30-60 seconds from reading your resume whether you are a fit for the position or not. Most resumes look nice, but don't have the skillset we are looking for. Cost is not a factor at the level of review I'm performing, skillset is.
Best of luck in your job search.
The company where I work created a new position to gather and present internal statistics for use in forecasting and project management and other things. This newly created job required a degree in something, several years of experience in statistics, and several years of experience in the custom-built statistics engine and toolset we had just created within our company. The product literally didn't exist a month prior to this job being created and it wasn't based on any off the shelf solution.
Also, it was going to pay a pretty low starting salary (we never pay new hires anything worth mentioning; if you can't actually speak any language and may or may not be legal, we love you but we won't pay you jack) and require relocating (not paid relocation mind you), in my case.
My bosses boss put very strong pressure on me to apply for this job. They wanted to hire internally, you know. Not bring in a newbie. I refused on the grounds that the job requirements meant I didn't qualify -and in fact it was not possible for any living being short of a time lord to have had ANY experience with this toolset much less the years experience stipulated. The sort of network access needed to gather the raw numbers needed was also clearly impossible to get and nobody would lift a finger to help with something like this. I could see the fail written all over it, so I refused.
The eventually hired an intern or something. They quit after a week.
Sig for hire.
I've had a hiring manager (who was also the CEO because it was a small start up) make me an offer,then run through my credit report with a fine tooth comb and rescind the offer. 1. My credit wasn't that bad. 2. He claimed that since they developed 'some' financial software, that prospective clients could want to run my credit. I'm no lawyer but I'm pretty sure that wouldn't even be legal unless I consented to it and am POSITIVE this guy was clueless as a hiring manager (most likely because he was also the CEO).
I find modern IT job posting to be ridiculous!
From what I've seen, MOST IT groups would benefit less from a candidate who already has "XX" experience with a specific tool, or language, than from someone who takes a methodical approach to problem solving. Someone who isn't afraid to use Google to research answers, who has demonstrated an ability to learn new technologies, or languages quickly.
I wonder if this is an example of what happens when non-techies insert themselves into hiring people to perform tasks they don't really understand.
Experience is good, but inquisitiveness is so much more!
About a month ago I saw an ad on Craigslist that said that Mad River Hospital was looking for an IT tech.
(Mad River Hospital is located at the intersection of Highways 299 and 101, in Northern California, about three hundred miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, and San Francisco. It's a five- to six-hour drive from Silicon Valley. Located close to the center of California's notorious Emerald Triangle, one would expect something more glamorous .. but, regrettably, Humboldt County is a backwoods, riddled with unemployment. Don't move up here without multiple sources of income.)
The fact that they referred to the position as an 'IT tech' said something about the hospital.
'IT' is short for 'information technology', and 'tech' is slang for 'technician' ... ... so, basically, they were looking for an information technology technician.
Which is confusing. And annoying. Thoughtless. Kind of stupid. Not what one expects from top-notch medical practitioners. Y'know?
But they weren't dignifying this person with a title. They were a 'tech'. Not technical, not a technician ... just, a 'tech'.
And so I'm going to suggest that Mad River Hospital is awash with abbreviated thinkers.
I sent the author of the ad an email, asking about the compensation. No reply.
I submitted the official job application form - no answer.
Now, that's plain broken. The only reason I can think of to not automatically generate an acknowledgement for each and every contact with Human Resources, would be to create deniability, for later use. That's so transparent.
Let me say, as an aside, that the whole employment application process is broken.
The job application form is a PDF - but it's not the kind of PDF that can be filled out, like an 1040EZ tax form, and doesn't even need to be printed ...no, it's the old kind, that needs to be printed out, filled in, and then scanned - or mailed.
The application is four pages - scanned in, that's four separate images, one for each page of the job application - and yet the Mad River Hospital submission process only allows one file to be attached ... requiring one to submit one's application four times - once for each page.
I can only compare such results to an intellectual rigor mortis. There is no good explanation for such a bad interface. I mean, they are only a few minutes away from a state university campus (Humboldt State University, also in Arcata). There should be no lack of students capable of extending this web-based interface, or rewriting it entirely.
So, I decided to drop by and introduce myself. See who I might be working with. See if I could break through this wall of black ice that surrounds the place.
Nobody at Mad River Hospital would tell me where the Information Technology office was. I'm not sure they even knew, themselves. The person at the switchboard referred me to her supervisor.
That's another bad sign - when people conceal their ignorance and indifference behind a facade of officiousness - by the way.
The supervisor of the person at the switchboard grudgingly allowed me to know where the Human Resources office was. But even HR wouldn't tell me anything. They accepted my application (again) and bid me farewell - admitting that they remembered seeing my earlier submissions, but nothing else.
(All of these people were women, by the way. I didn't see a man in the whole place. I've heard that's a problem at other medical facilities, here in Humboldt County, as well ... some mysterious force has driven all of the men out of all of the positions except for the few that women don't want or can't do. Very odd. But I digress.)
It was a huge waste of time.
Recently I spoke to someone who works at Mad River Hospital. Actually, I spoke to her husband.
He told me that she said that MRH is a madhouse - computers don't work, computers don't communicate, medica
There is no ‘IT’ shortage. Hiring Managers post job description and what it really is... it is the hiring manager's ‘IT wish list’. There are IT positions posted, by hiring managers, with the incorrect job title! There is a difference between Call Center Agent, Help Desk Support, and Desktop Technician.
I know the Hiring Manager DO NOT know the difference because they ask me to tell them the difference?
Thus far, I have been subjected to grueling ‘telephone screening’ in which I had to correct the interviewer for the correct answer. Basically the Hiring Manager has been given a script with ‘buzz words’ and are seeking to hear these ‘buzz words’ This is the step where an IT professional, seeking a job has to be careful. If you make the uneducated/stupid buddy-buddy hiring manager feel/look stupid over the phone, your resume will NEVER make it to the IT Manager, the person in a position to hire you.
I suppose I should have been more clear.
The OP stated that he was looking for talent at a median wage; Not high, not low.
This means that he needs to target his employment search criteria for those individuals who have good talent, and are not:
1) Overqualified (Expectations from working in the industry for long periods of time is that pay will go UP over time, not stay static.)
2) Burdened with oppressive student debt (which will require above median pay to be a viable career choice for such individuals.)
Demanding a degree, while insisting upon median pay, excludes the vast majority of the talent pool.
The majority of viable talent that can work for median pay will be those that either have no student debts (already a poor prospect), or those without a degree.
So, again-- by the numbers, the people he is looking for are not in the demographic he is insisting upon. More available A+ talent will fall into the "no degree" category than will fall into "Has a degree" category.
What I said was not wrong, but I agree, was not very clear.
Yes HR departments are clueless about hiring I.T. people.
As a hiring manager, I can tell you that the resumes we get are frighteningly bad, the skill sets not even close, the grammar/punctuation on so many of them are horrible beyond belief. I have a theory that because you have to prove you're looking for work to get unemployment some folks apply for random jobs and don't even look until the unemployment checks stop coming - because I have faith in the human race I can't accept that so many applicants are so clueless.
Good developers - are exceedingly hard to find and there is a global shortage of them. The same can be said for Good Employers. This isn't the fault of evil corporations, or evil governments, or the Rethugnicans, or the Demoncrats... It's just life. 99% of everything is crap! So when the 1% comes by, grab it.
Murphy was an optimist
I am a boss and I do none of those things. We hire junior people and invest a lot of time and money training them, and giving them larger and more complex assignments. We hire senior people and treat them like gold, because they are worth it.
You're working for the wrong company.
Murphy was an optimist
No matter what profession you're in, education is really only a foundation. Experience is the rest of the picture, and education is no substitute for it. Education only makes it a bit easier to grasp concepts that would take someone without it a lot longer.
Unlike in Capitalism, you need to be a "highly skilled wage slave" to get a job in Globalization.
Casteism
I still disagree with the numbers overall.
As far a overqualified: I have hired engineers with no BS (no pun intended) but generally they have 2-4 more years of experience than those of equivalent background with a BS (makes sense - same way an MS counts for an extra year and a PhD an extra 3 or so... which also means if you are doing it just to get a better job, PhDs are not in themselves remotely worth it!) I think in fact it would be disingenuous to those *without* a degree to underestimate their own ambitions that way!
Also, we do not pay engineers based on their debt, whether it be student loans, cars, or a mortgage (which dwarfs student loans in the Bay Area), and none have ever brought it up. So that's really a non-issue from a hiring manager's perspective. In fact, that sounds like a borderline discriminatory practice in itself...
My experience is that the A+ talent (and this is not grade inflation - "A+ talent" is the top few percent, max) can command the top salaries pretty much wherever they want. You are talking about the B+ talent. So I suppose I might grudgingly agree IF you are lucky you might be able to find a B+ engineer for a B salary because a few companies with dumb hiring policies passed based on lack of a degree...
I was once brought in for an interview for a Unix Systems Administration job. The ad said they needed someone with experience with Unix administration and knowledge of basic shell scripting. I got an interview with an HR person and it went well. I stressed my extensive experience with Sun Solaris and Linux. She sounded very positive. A couple days later I got a call to come in for an interview with the IT manager. I arrived a bit early, dressed to the nines in a new suite. I was kept waiting for over half an hour and when the IT manager came into the interview room, he gave off the sense of wanting to be anywhere else but there. He asked me how many years experience I had with IBM systems and AIX. I told him that I had very little experience in these areas. He said, "Well I need an AIX admin. You are obviously not qualified. I'm sorry, this has been a big waste of time." He then marched out of the room without so much as a handshake or a "nice to meet you", cursing the HR staff. It lasted all of 1 and a half minutes.
-- James Walker
Can I agree with you?
There is a problem with this statement:
I think in fact it would be disingenuous to those *without* a degree to underestimate their own ambitions that way!
It often isn't that these people choose not to get a degree, it is that they are (either for time or money) incapable of getting the degree.
There are 3 trends working to cause this:
1) Cost of tuition continues to climb.
2) Median base pay remains the same
3) Work/Life balance of employees continues to tip toward work.
This means that adults paying for college (either their own, or their children's) are running into hard limits. There are only 24 hours in a day, and with wages remaining relatively static, despite people working more hours, coupled with rising tuition costs, the eventuality is that the middle class will no longer be able to afford higher education, even with debt up to their eyeballs.
Sooner or later, as a hiring manager, YOU WILL have to drop the degree requirement.
From my perspective, the issue is that HR departments view "Has degree" as a marker for "Can read, Can write, and can finish what they start." In reality, they are becoming more and more "You need to be this wealthy to work here."
I understand that they (HR) have legal obstacles that prevent them using actual skills based assessments for literacy and basic math, as part of the equal opportunity law, which is what kicked the whole "Use 'has degree' as a proxy measure" thing in the first place. "College degree" is the new "Highschool diploma". The problem is that unlike highschool, college is not subsidized by taxes, and thus not free to the public good.
The student debt issue is very much an important factor. If you don't contemplate it, you are not properly measuring the reality that your employees face. When you leave the gate with 20k to 30k in non-dischargable debts, you NEED to make above median salary to pay just the interest rates. (Unless daddy and mommy are really wealthy, and paid FOR you that is.) Nobody wants to hire a fresh college grad for above median pay, because "has degree" is the new "highschool diploma". You need that degree, plus several years experience. The problem is that people with an iron ball of debt on their leg at the start are unable to survive without going deeper into debts of other kinds while they build that experience to get the better pay. [most of their income goes to paying minimum payments on their debts.]
Right now the situation is just 'barely' tenable, but cost of tuition shows no signs of leveling off or of going down. This means that in the next decade or so, the cost of higher learning will outstrip the middle class's ability to pay.
At that time, the only people who will be able to get degrees of any kind will be people who are from rich families.
If you don't factor student debt into your hiring policy now, YOU WILL in another 10 years.
You will have to. OR-- you can be deluded, and hire 100% H1Bs.
There is a problem with this statement:
I think in fact it would be disingenuous to those *without* a degree to underestimate their own ambitions that way!
It often isn't that these people choose not to get a degree, it is that they are (either for time or money) incapable of getting the degree.
No, I think you totally misunderstood it... I'm saying that those without a degree should not be treated any differently (besides maybe requiring a couple extra years of experience/practical work to make up for the lack of a degree) while you seem to be telling the OP "hire them, you can get them for cheap!" While there are some (usually very conservative/old school) companies that do look for degrees, that's completely not the trend in Silicon Valley these days. Hell, many of the founders never completed theirs, so it's almost ingrained in the culture to go for talent over education. So I'm saying, don't underestimate the earning potential of those people! And it proves out over the years. At least in SV, your pay is largely a combination of the *range* of the position (which can be highly variable) and something that matches/beats an employee's current salary. If you keep settling you will never get the pay increases...
The problem is that unlike highschool, college is not subsidized by taxes, and thus not free to the public good.
This is partly true. Private schools by definition, of course, are not. Though if you are going to Stanford or MIT you are probably going to be able to pay off those student loans quickly enough, anyway. Public schools IMO are the problem. How the hell can a public school charge $13k for tuition (which doesn't even include room and board). Well - we know the answer - because the US is no longer prioritizing education.
You will have to. OR-- you can be deluded, and hire 100% H1Bs.
Which makes a lot of this is fairly academic (again no pun intended) since there is such a shortage of decent SW engineers in the US right now that we are importing as many as allowed from India and China, etc. And those developers will pretty much always have degrees AND be cheaper to hire. Not saying that's necessarily a good thing, but it's the current reality.
In fact, the combination of skyrocketing US tuition and more talent from out of the county means it's really not going to end up being a decision of the company HR or hiring managers, it's going to be up to the US government to fix (whether by fixing tuition or limiting H1Bs). And given the new Republican Congress doesn't give a rat's ass about student debt (they are happy with charging 7% on Federal loans when you can get a freaking mortgage or car loan for 4%), and shrinking H1Bs would seriously harm economic/tech growth in the US in the short/mid term, it's likely that nothing will be done in the near future. Big surprise...
Thank You. I've had plenty of clueless, ignorant bosses and I have worked for companies that were astoundingly evil and corrupt. That's life! I've also had great bosses, and worked for great companies. The idea that "all corporations are evil" and "all bosses are exploitative" is just so damn naive and counterproductive...
Murphy was an optimist
everyone thinks that they are the "A" team. Some people who don't belong in IT at all are very good at bullshitting as well. The industry is also overflowing with people with no interest in it who have been lured in to it by promises of high paying easy jobs gold rush style.
Second, plenty of people work full time and get certifications with the aim of furthering their career or getting in to a different area than the one they're in - just because you couldn't/didn't doesn't make someone who did automatically less skilled than you are.
Third, I can't tell you how many degree-having diploma mill idiots, including people with Masters+ degrees, I've seen; they're too many to count.
I agree with you that experience is the best thing to have, but a lot of that is chicken-egg. Everyone wants someone with experience but you can't get experience without first having the job.
(2) Get hired by them ;
(3) Be good at your job ;
(4)
(5) Profit or retirement.
It's been 23 years since my last job interview, which was conducted by the MD of the company and made me the first person on the payroll. We're probably pushing number 500 now.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"