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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?
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
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.
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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
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.
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.
Incorrect. They are rational decision makers in their world-view. Outsourcing = lower expenses. Reality check dude. Welcome to the modern world.
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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Yeah, sorry about that. My script was supposed to send my résume to one million companies but I messed up my for loop and it all ended up at your place. Sorry about that.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
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 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.
$()
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.
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.)
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.
Please someone mod this up. I would like to had that often you also have to take care with people in HR, as often they are family of someone important up the ladder.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I knew this guy who tried doing what you suggested.
When spring came, he melted.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
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.'"
"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
$ 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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."
Outsourcing = lower expenses
True
Also true, lower expenses => lower wages here
Good thing? Well, until the economic contractions lead to prices here falling.
emt 377 emt 4
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
So, they don't have much of a clue. If you actually get hired, expect to end up as the IT guy for everything. Because they don't really know what they need or want. Also, expect conflicting requirements...
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.
Here you failed the test. Fill out all four pages, scan them in, insert them into a word processor document, then export said document into one PDF. Result: one PDF with all four pages, attach that to the application.
I know for a fact that the above is possible with LibreOffice. I suspect that Microsoft Office can do it too, or you could "print" the document via some PDF "printing" software.
C - the footgun of programming languages
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
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"