Hunting For a Tech Job In 2015

Nerval's Lobster writes It's a brand new year, and by at least some indications the economy's doing pretty well, which means that a lot of people will begin looking for a new, possibly better job. If you're looking to trade up, here are some tips, some of which are pretty standard-issue ("Update resume," etc.), and others that could actually stand you in good stead, including using the Bureau of Labor Statistics to judge the median salary for a position before negotiating with HR. According to Glassdoor, Dice, and other sources, the average salary for many kinds of tech workers will only rise over the next year, so it really could be a good time to see what's out there. Good luck.

Comments

economy doing well?

[umdesch4]

"and by at least some indications the economy's doing pretty well"

Which indications are those? Forgive me, but I don't watch CNBC.

Re:economy doing well?

[lgw]

Where do you live? Here in the Seattle area, the economy is booming. From fast food to construction right through to dev jobs, everyone is hiring like crazy. There are about 20 new buildings (mostly highrises) going up in downtown Seattle, and apartments are going up everywhere in the suburbs. No question things are doing well here. Where's the suck?

Re:economy doing well?

[meustrus]

There's an important difference between the dot-com boom of the 90s and now. In the 90s you needed lots of capital and the smartest minds available to get online. Now you don't. Anybody with a little bit of programming skill can write an app in weeks and make it available to everyone. Anyone who needs a server can get an AWS instance and expect it to scale up when they need it to. Anyone who needs revenue can get a Google AdSense account. And anyone who actually needs substantial capital can point to Facebook's success. Not that Facebook or any other capital-driven businesses are immune. There may well be a bust. But the industry is more mature, the rewards are easier to define, and nobody wants to see their kids' faces when their investment decisions contribute to Facebook's demise.

Re:Best advice I heard, and followed

[lgw]

Get the hell out of the tech industry. I went back to school, got my PharmD and couldn't be happier.

Won't you be surprised when the pharmacy robots displace you. Better to learn to program those robots, if you can!

Re:Getter by better if you have skills...

[Anrego]

Personally I don't see anything specifically wrong here.

There's a reason experience costs more: it's valuable. If a company can afford to exclusively hire experienced people it's probably not a terrible idea.

Hiring new grads is a cost savings measure, and as was said, it usually comes with the expected downsides of hiring someone who's never held an actual dev job before. Employers weight the pros and cons and proceed accordingly.

Dice = Contract Jobs

[JakFrost]

I've always been disappointed in Dice.com since it's so full of slimy recruiting firms and even slimier head-hungers offering low-paying contracts. It's so full of Indian firms that it resembles a tech call-center from India and I don't bother anymore to list my resume there since I'll be flooded with worthless contracts in cities that I have no interest in working with. These worthless recruiters don't bother reading your profile or requirements (Perm-Only, Local Area Only) and just spam e-mail and call you with keyword matching crap short-term and low-paying contracts from cities across the nation that you have no interest in working in or moving to. Half the time I can't understand their thick Indian accents either and I wouldn't bother working with them if they can't even communicate well enough with them.

Dice.com is the slums of Tech Recruiting.

Re:Dice = Contract Jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

To be honest, I don't think any really exist.

Employers who hire new grads tend to go straight to the universities. Past that, I suspect most decent jobs are found either through networking or by going to places and asking if they are hiring (this can be surprisingly effective, and a lot of places appreciate the initiative).

It has been awhile since I've heard about someone getting a good job by sending a resume in to some random job they saw posted somewhere. It's always "I have a friend who is working there" or "I heard they won contract X so I went down and talked to them".

Places like dice.com are, as said, shitty short term contract work. Most companies worth working for do their own HR and have enough contacts through their own employees to find good people.

Re:Dice = Contract Jobs

[pls2917]

http://careers.stackoverflow.c... I found my current job there and it's the only place we advertise

Painted into a corner

[jandersen]

I think the tech industry has painted itself into a corner. I had the misfortune to lose my job early in 2013 and spent almost the whole year looking before I found something; during that whole period I actually saw the same, relatively few jobs being readvertised over and over, with very little new showing up. The sector I was looking at was what you'd call 'devops', and it seemed like the companies were trying to get people with long experience in both development and system administration, but they weren't willing to pay more than what you'd pay for a middle ranking call-center operator. I can't quite imagine how anybody can imagine that being an attractive proposition to anybody with the qualifications.

So, it looks to me like a number of companies - almost all of them internet businesses - have painted themselves into a corner, where they deperately need highly qualified employees that they are never going to be able or willing to pay for.

Wall Street is NOT the economy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wall Street has been doing well because of all that Fed money that has been printed in the last few years. It has absolutely nothing to do with economic or business fundamentals. It was all bullshit money.

1. Hedge funds/billionaires being able to borrow at the Fed rate and at much higher margins than us peons (95% vs 50% for the rest of us) pumped the money into the stock markets.

2. All the money floating around was used by corporations to do stock buybacks - not because their businesses were worth investing in (contrary to the myth taught in Finance classes and spewed by corporate PR departments) but because it allowed the CEOs and billionaires to get even richer.

3. 1 & 2 were all done at our expense because it weakened the dollar - making consumer goods more expensive; while our wages haven't gone up. In the meantime, we are working longer and longer hours because in order to keep profits up, companies have been laying people off and making their current workforce work harder and longer.

A plan that was supposed to help us out and get employment back to 2007 levels has horribly failed.

Re:Best advice I heard, and followed

[ranton]

Robots might replace pharmacy technicians someday, but we'll always need pharmacists, let alone PharmDs.

I worked as a software developer in the pharmaceutical industry, and I assure you that PharmDs are just as in danger of being automated as pharmacy techs. Perhaps even more so because of their higher pay. Every seminar I sat through where our customers talked about their successes with our software measured success in number of jobs reduced (usually through attrition, not firing, but the net result is the same). One key metric of success was being able to get the same amount of work done with more pharmacy techs instead of PharmDs, thus reducing overall wages.

PharmD jobs are almost the poster child for a high wage career that can be more easily replaced by automation than most low wage work. It is a career that requires very highly skilled workers because of the vast amount of knowledge they need to have. That is exactly the type of work that the new wave of AI is being designed to do. Like another poster already mentioned, Watson really is going to displace a good percentage of your industry's jobs.