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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.
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?
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)
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.
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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...
But then end up only hiring liars.
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
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
It's the Libertarian dream; the freedom to starve.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If that's that case, then I must be a fantastic programmer, and not even realize it.
I know how to write software, but am not driven to delve into it. I dont find it all that pleasurable, but do find it a valuable skill to have when I need to make something that does $FOO, when I need it to. My solutions may not be the most efficient, or the most pretty, but they do $FOO, and I am the only person that needs to worry about the ugly code. I can recognize ugly code when I see it, (as I make plenty of it, and know it to be ugly.)
I am honest about that. I do not consider myself a good programmer at all. There are many people out there that make much better code than me, and do so with greater speed, alacrity, and skill.
I keep hearing horror stories about people who can't pass a fizz-buzz test, or who can't make a good function that can withstand having strange edge cases thrown at it. I can do that, but again-- I dont even really consider myself a programmer. I did a little bit of VBA backend wallpaper-paste type crap for one of my recent jobs to fill niche needs for my company because nobody else in my department knew how to use VBA, but any really competent programmer would have run circles around me.
The major problem I see here, is that if I said this at a job interview, the hiring manager would laugh nervously, thank me for coming, then promptly shred my file.
Could I learn to be a good programmer? Sure. All the programming skill I picked up is entirely self-taught, because I wanted to learn how to do it, because it is one of those essential skills of this century. I really do think that it will be as "expected" as being able to use a word processor or a spreadsheet program. Given the right motivation, I could become very good at it. I just dont find it pleasurable to do.
That's the real heart of the issue.
Hiring managers dont look for people that can be molded to fit a position in the company.
Hiring managers want the candidate that "Is a perfect fit"-- which really means "Is just like that other guy we had, but who isn't that other guy."
This is analogous to a starving man looking for "Just the perfect morsel of food", standing at an all you can eat buffet, looking at food with minor blemishes on it.
"Oh, that apple has a spot on it." he says. "I can't eat that apple-- but, oh, i'm so hungry!"
After looking at every single morsel of food on the table, he makes the bold assertion that he just cant find anything to eat there.
"There's a terrible food shortage!" he screams, holding his stomach, as it rumbles angrily-- Surrounded by a mountain of perfectly edible food. It just isn't absolutely perfect, and he wont dare lower his standards on what he considers to be perfect.
So, he goes crying to the government. "I'm starving!" he screams, amid a giant buffet of food. "I need food or I will die!"
The government says "Ok, We will import food for you, since there does not seem to be enough. India has food they can provide, we'll ask them to send some."
"YAY!" says the hiring manager.
What does india do? They say "The man's expectations are unrealistic, which is why he wont eat the food that surrounds him. He does not realize that the food he has is better than what we have to offer, so we will just peel or cook the food first, to hide the blemishes. He wont know the difference."
So they do that.
The man sees the cooked food-- which has been peeled, boiled, fried, and otherwise rendered so that the blemishes are no longer visible-- even though the ingredients were far from the model of perfection he held in his mind. But it looks appealing, and it isn't obviously bearing any defects, so he digs in. "MM! This is good shit!" he says. "Gimme more!"
That's what I really see as what's going on here.
Am I a perfect programmer? No. Do hiring managers demand perfect programmers? yes. Is there a shortage of perfect programmers? Probably-- NOBODY is perfect, especially when the definition of "Perfect" is very m
http://search.dilbert.com/comi...
You aren't paying enough. It is sort of obvious. Youe offering is below market so no one applies and those that do apply get promotions or can reasonably expect much better pay and conditions. Either you don't need the position filled, or you need to pay more to fill it.
Can I ask, why is it when it comes to hiring technical staff business people have such a hard time understanding supply and demand. You never hear them saying 'Why cant I buy a top of the line server rack for $1?", but are shocked that no one applies for their job offered at half market rate.
Ah so you are sabotaging yourself by refusing to indicate prices up front. I don't apply to places that don't list salary ranges (I'm not a techie but still) because it is a bad faith negotiating tactic that places the power in the employers hand.
"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
Because society is just one big playpen for sociopaths, and the weak must die!!!!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So, let me make sure I understand this perfectly, and without error:
You wouldn't hire me, because I am not writing in the way you have come to expect to be written to, (Please, do enlighten me with a stellar example of such communication, so that I might emulate it for you. I don't want you to starve to death standing at an all you can eat buffet, because the food there does not "meet your standards".)
Here, let me be blunt with you.
You are hiring for a position where you want a technical problem to be solved with a robust and fully logical solution. That's what good programmers provide. Yet, you have now redefined the role to be the logical union of ((Good analytical skill) + (Creativity in problem resolution) + (Competency implementing the solution as real computer code)) with ((Writes like an English Lit major when communicating with peers) + (Keeps trying even though logically there is no viable solution.))
Just so you know, those two compound sets do not overlap. ;) "Keeps trying when there is no logical solution" (and provably so) is mutually exclusive to "Good analytical skill".
But again, rather than accept this with aplomb, and reconsider your position if even for a moment-- you have instead resorted to an ad-hominem attack at worst, and a non-sequitor at best.
Remember, I don't even want the job you are offering. I have moved to a completely different career path, far removed from IT. I have no interest in the positions you are offering. My only interest is to see you stop acting illogically, as it will make the hiring experience better for you and for your applicants. That's all.
Your response was to say that you would rather take people that are not capable of understanding large and complex problems, because they don't complain.
(And you wonder why your programmers are sub-par, and cant understand basic concepts in logic?)