Employers Want More Open Source Workers, Says Linux Foundation Study (zdnet.com)

As in past years, "Open source is professionalizing, and employers are seeking staff with demonstrable skills," says the executive director of the Linux Foundation, describing the results of a new study with Dice.com. An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: According to the two groups' 2017 Open Source Jobs Survey and Report, "Not only do 89 percent of hiring managers report difficulty in finding qualified talent for open source roles, but 58 percent report needing to hire more open source professionals in the next six months than in the six months prior"... Seventy percent of employers, up from 66 percent in 2016, are hunting for workers with cloud experience. Web technologies placed second, with 67 percent of hiring managers hunting for workers with JavaScript and related skills. This is up five percent from last year's 62 percent. The demand for Linux talent remains strong. Sixty-five percent of hiring managers are looking for Linux experts. That's down slightly from 2016's 71 percent.
The three most common positions that they're looking to fill are developer, DevOps engineer, and systems administrator, according to the study, and "a growing number of companies (60 percent) are looking for full-time hires, compared with 53 percent last year.

"Nearly half (47 percent) of companies will pay for employees to become open-source certified."

Comments

Re:No, they don't.

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. The only thing that sticks in the minds of employers who don't understand the open source model is that talented people will spend countless hours working on something basically for free, so they want that cheap talent, willing to work long hours, for themselves.

Re:No, they don't.

[Anonymous Coward]

money-making is not compatible with open source.

... unless that software is of secondary importance to the business. For example, websites make more money from a free OS (Linux), a free webserver (Apache), a free DB (MySQL), because they don't have to pay for all that software.

Re:No, they don't.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong.

You can't sell open source, but you can make plenty of money supporting it. Like redhat. Or make money using open source for providing services. Apache is popular for being good - being free too is not a disadvantage. You make more money when you don't have to pay royalties. Even better if you have some people who can program the occational fix - so you won't need a consultant for that.

Difficulty in finding quality talent? Bullshit.

[nctritech]

"89 percent of hiring managers report difficulty in finding qualified talent for open source roles"

When your job ad demands 7-10 years of experience in a thing that isn't even 10 years old then yeah, you might have some difficulty "finding quality talent" because you're being ridiculous.

Job ad bullet points are used as filters and do a great job (ha!) of filtering out all of the ideal candidates in favor of the ones that will gladly lie about their skill sets yet can't write anything more trivial than strcpy() on a whiteboard. Maybe you stop looking for "workers with cloud experience" and start looking for "workers that have great system administration skills who we'll train to use the specific 'cloud' thingy we're using this month." After all, what these job posts that demand a "hit the ground running" candidate fail to realize is that they have to train the new employee in the operations and peculiarities unique to their business anyway.

Pay a decent wage and write realistic job applications and give everyone who applies in earnest a fair shake and you might not have so much "difficulty finding quality talent."

Re:Difficulty in finding quality talent? Bullshit.

[Gravis Zero]

Job ad bullet points are used as filters and do a great job (ha!) of filtering out all of the ideal candidates in favor of the ones that will gladly lie about their skill sets yet can't write anything more trivial than strcpy() on a whiteboard. Maybe you stop looking for "workers with cloud experience" and start looking for "workers that have great system administration skills who we'll train to use the specific 'cloud' thingy we're using this month." After all, what these job posts that demand a "hit the ground running" candidate fail to realize is that they have to train the new employee in the operations and peculiarities unique to their business anyway.

This, sooooo much this!

HR is the real problem here and they need to be fired.

Re:Difficulty in finding quality talent? Bullshit.

[El Cubano]

When your job ad demands 7-10 years of experience in a thing that isn't even 10 years old [i.redd.it] then yeah, you might have some difficulty "finding quality talent" because you're being ridiculous.

I really would like to think that this is a good way to filter out the liars or a way to test the applicant pool's BS filter. Though, I have never applied for a job that asked for more experience with something for longer than it has existed. However, if I were faced with that, I would specify my actual experience with the item and in the cover letter add a note about how what they are asking for is not possible. I would probably also add any related experience that I might have. So if they asked for 10 years of Node.js, I might put that I only have X years of Node.js experience, but I also have Y years of experience with these other dynamic server-side languages.

Going through that will tell you quite a few things. If they reject your resume/cover letter then it was probably for the best. If they are really sharp (remember that you could have a sharp hiring manager stuck behind a not-so-sharp HR department), then they will see you for what they are worth and they are likely to also flat out reject anybody who claims to have the impossible qualification.

Of course, a job posting that has an impossible to meet requirement might be a warning flag (e.g., dysfunctional or incompetent organization) or just a pretext to be able to say that no US citizen is qualified and that the situation calls for an H1B.

I would like to look at it more form the positive perspective than the negative. However, after re-reading what I wrote, I suspect that might just be wishful thinking.

Re:Difficulty in finding quality talent? Bullshit.

[omnichad]

Let's have HR get right on that.

Re:Difficulty in finding quality talent? Bullshit.

[Billly Gates]

HR is doing their job.

Their job is not to hire you. Their job is to reduce risk and retention. That means less firings and lawsuits.

If that means hiring Indians who have that experience, but may not be A players that is fine as that reduces variation as they can't leave as easily. HR can show the numbers to MBAs that they reduced lawsuits and unemployment benefits.

Very good and very bad and unpredictableness is hated among the folks who do statistics at your workplace. Dull people who show up everyday you have to fire the least and get sued.

The problem is HR is blamed when someone else makes a poor hiring decision and needs to fire of if they quit to find a job that pays better. So they are trying to reduce this by adding mediocre workers who fit the job description rather than great or bad employees.

Re:Difficulty in finding quality talent? Bullshit.

[Billly Gates]

BUZZ Taleo or IMS filtered you out. HR won't even read your cover letter as a result.

Welcome to the world of automated hiring by cloud software. Taleo was designed as an example to score and assist, but the sales team promises HR they need to do 0 screening WE DO IT ALL for you! So unless your resume has node.js for every single job you ever did since 2007 your application will be deleted and a liar will get the automated email to the HR manager.

More than likely they will whine WE CAN"T FIND QUALIFIED applicants rather than blame the program and will have the executives lobby for H1B1 Indians to come in since they are the only ones who work hard and have 10 years of node.js experience etc.

Re:Difficulty in finding quality talent? Bullshit.

[arth1]

HR is doing their job.

Their job is not to hire you. Their job is to reduce risk and retention.

They often do an excellent job at reducing retention, I give you that.

Now, reducing attrition would be a more noble goal. I would suggest that HR should have a forced attrition matching the company's overall attrition, for both senior and junior positions. That would give them some incentive.

Re:Difficulty in finding quality talent? Bullshit.

[Billly Gates]

HR is doing their job.

Their job is not to hire you. Their job is to reduce risk and retention.

They often do an excellent job at reducing retention, I give you that.

Now, reducing attrition would be a more noble goal. I would suggest that HR should have a forced attrition matching the company's overall attrition, for both senior and junior positions. That would give them some incentive.

What's the profit motive?

Now if I owned a company where high talent was required like let's say a .COM company I would agree. If I were the CEO of Denny's I would pick retention. It doesn't take a genius to wait tables, put a steak and eggs on a grill, etc. I guess it depends on the industry, but as a worker I do find it insulting and hurtful frankly to be treated like garbage and filtered out using software applications that HR loves to use to prevent you from applying if you are not in a statistical average of not being crap or quiting.

Doing the same repetitive tasks over again doesn't make a great employee per say like a great programmer who mostly has used Java for hte past 5 years doesn't mean he can't code for Python if he learned or C++ if he used it last decade. But HR would agree that person is an outliner and be a risk of being fired so do not consider even if he or she might be great.

Re:Difficulty in finding quality talent? Bullshit.

[zifn4b]

"89 percent of hiring managers report difficulty in finding qualified talent for open source roles" When your job ad demands 7-10 years of experience in a thing that isn't even 10 years old then yeah, you might have some difficulty "finding quality talent" because you're being ridiculous. Job ad bullet points are used as filters and do a great job (ha!) of filtering out all of the ideal candidates in favor of the ones that will gladly lie about their skill sets yet can't write anything more trivial than strcpy() on a whiteboard. Maybe you stop looking for "workers with cloud experience" and start looking for "workers that have great system administration skills who we'll train to use the specific 'cloud' thingy we're using this month." After all, what these job posts that demand a "hit the ground running" candidate fail to realize is that they have to train the new employee in the operations and peculiarities unique to their business anyway. Pay a decent wage and write realistic job applications and give everyone who applies in earnest a fair shake and you might not have so much "difficulty finding quality talent."

I recently found the answer to this. During the great recession all companies down-sized to deal with the contracting economy. This also meant downsizing HR. HR also began receiving floods of applications for jobs due to high unemployment. HR's response to this was to implement a much more sophisticated ATS (Applicant Tracking System). These ATS's parse resumes and cover letters to do keyword matching to compute a scorecard. They also prefer a LinkedIn style resume. If you use certain fonts, formatting, etc. it won't be able to parse your resume and you will get a very low rating on your scorecard. It then takes all the scorecards and ranks them in descending order so that HR supposedly knows which applications to spend time looking at and disregard the rest. The problem is the ATS's don't work very well. You can search online to find out why. There are also applicants "gaming the system" to get artificially inflated scores. I also believe some of the ATS's are configured in such a way that would be considered unethical with ulterior motives. This is however all legal because the Department of Labor hasn't established rules beyond discrimination against a protected class of citizen.

Re:Difficulty in finding quality talent? Bullshit.

[zifn4b]

Job ad bullet points are used as filters and do a great job (ha!) of filtering out all of the ideal candidates in favor of the ones that will gladly lie about their skill sets yet can't write anything more trivial than strcpy() on a whiteboard. Maybe you stop looking for "workers with cloud experience" and start looking for "workers that have great system administration skills who we'll train to use the specific 'cloud' thingy we're using this month." After all, what these job posts that demand a "hit the ground running" candidate fail to realize is that they have to train the new employee in the operations and peculiarities unique to their business anyway.

This, sooooo much this!

HR is the real problem here and they need to be fired.

Read my post above. Do a Google search for "Evil HR ATS". There are actually online services you can use that can compute a score for your resume and cover letter. You can actually use this to inflate your score just by word-smithing the right keywords in. The whole system is broke.

Re:Difficulty in finding quality talent? Bullshit.

[zifn4b]

The problem is HR is blamed when someone else makes a poor hiring decision and needs to fire of if they quit to find a job that pays better. So they are trying to reduce this by adding mediocre workers who fit the job description rather than great or bad employees.

Translation: when the business isn't successful, the C suite needs a scapegoat for their failure to be able to run the business adequately.

Re:Difficulty in finding quality talent? Bullshit.

[zifn4b]

Update your resume *every single day*, by at least a few lines of text, even if you're just rotating among 5 or so resumes, so that the resume search engines report it as significantly modified and "fresh".

This presumes you have a LinkedIn profile. From what I understand, your chances decrease around 17% if you don't have one. IMHO, that's discrimination. It's almost Orwellian. The good news is when there are more jobs than applicants again, this will change.

Re:Difficulty in finding quality talent? Bullshit.

[rnturn]

If they are really sharp (remember that you could have a sharp hiring manager stuck behind a not-so-sharp HR department), then they will see you for what they are worth and they are likely to also flat out reject anybody who claims to have the impossible qualification.

Uh... that's highly doubtful. Either the ATS software has filtered you out based on the buzzwords in your resume--or because you didn't include certain oh-so-important buzzwords--or the lazy HR droid never even passed along your resume to that sharp hiring manager because s/he was asked to forward 20 resumes and you were 21st in the list. I've heard stories about HR people who deliberately set the thresholds on the ATS extremely high--essentially you're booted if you aren't meeting 100% of the job ad's requirements--so that they don't have so many resumes to go through. In that case, it would pay to lie just so you are considered for, at least, a phone screen.

Even if you do get in touch with an actual hiring manager and s/he thinks you're a good candidate, they are often required to refer you to the online application process and now you're back to dealing with Taleo or some other piece of junk ATS that will label you as unfit for employment. Now you're back to, well, see above.

Don't worry, though. The company's HR people will keep your UNIX/Linux-system administrator-heavy resume on file so they can forward you notices about future Java and Visual Basic development job openings that you're a perfect match for. Company's that have allowed HR to so completely insinuate themselves between hiring managers and job applicants pretty much deserve to go under.

Re:Difficulty in finding quality talent? Bullshit.

[david_thornley]

I love keyword searches. "I won't work with COBOL, and never touched CICS anyway. I have a friend who loves Python. I've heard about HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I own a .NET domain, and once played a musical instrument in the key of Csharp."

Sort of...

[sholdowa]

Until you read the job description, which usually includes Active Directory, MS SQLServer, and so on. Drives me to distraction.

Re:Sort of...

[rnturn]

Yep. I would hazard a guess that 80%-90% of the emails I receive from recruiters for a senior Linux-related position list requirements that indicate that Linux is really only a very minor part of the role. The rest of the job requirements show that they're looking to fill at least three wildly different roles. Usually they want a DBA, Cisco expert, Wintel admin, and a level 3 Linux/UNIX admin with Java, C++, and Powershell experience preferred.

the title that just wont die

[nimbius]

developer: write code. gotcha.

systems administrator: write scripts, config management, handle infra. gotcha.

DevOps engineer do neither. Write code in a shitty open floorplan office, get hounded for using noise cancelling headphones and working from home, endure nerf fights and microbrew on a tuesday because the CEO decided the devs were too gloomy for his investors to look at, and the burndown didnt matter anyway. Break incessantly from your coding job to go play sysadmin poorly. get overbooked to ops meetings, burn out and quit.

seriously, devops is a cancer. it only makes to @botchagalupe who uses it as a vehicle to pay the mortgage. It pisses off sysadmins by turning shit like NTP into a fragile 'microservice' of hypervisors and poorly documented ruby layers. it pisses off devs by making them take an oncall shift for an OS theyve only ever deployed to.

Re:the title that just wont die

[__aaclcg7560]

systems administrator: write scripts, config management, handle infra. gotcha.

And clea out IT storage closets. ;)

Re:the title that just wont die

[ls671]

Clea?

I thought that you were into manga or some other Japanese character. So, you fill IT closets with cleas or what?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:the title that just wont die

[__aaclcg7560]

If you attempt to clutter up one of the IT closets that I spent weeks in between tickets cleaning out, be prepared to deal with a pissed off sorceress. That's my solution for reclaiming wasted space and hiring more women in IT.

Re:the title that just wont die

[ls671]

Dear creimer,

I assume I can advertise my writing talents too, so please read this:

https://slashdot.org/comments....

It pisses me off because at first, I intended to do a quick comment, in the style that you cherish and it finally took me half an hour to structure it better and I don't pretend it is perfect. This is an important part of writing.

Keep in mind that I am not bragging about anything. I humbly offer my services as an editor since I truly believe that you might have something interesting to say after all.

Let me know what you think...

Re:the title that just wont die

[__aaclcg7560]

My coworkers and I were joking around this week that we had absolutely no work do before the next data drop. No storage closet to clean out, no network closet to reorganize, no hard drives to scan serial numbers from. I did write some documentation to alleviate the boredom of alternating between Slashdot and YouTube.

Re:the title that just wont die

[__aaclcg7560]

Just another slacker stuck in a dead-end job that students usually do on their way to a real job.

Except everyone hired for this project has 20+ years of experience in IT.

Re:the title that just wont die

[__aaclcg7560]

The other losers just have the decency not to troll Slashdot and have the self-awareness to realize that no one cares about their opinion.

They have never heard of Slashdot. But they do troll Reddit. Go figure.

Re:the title that just wont die

[Antique Geekmeister]

> My coworkers and I were joking around this week that we had absolutely no work do before the next data drop.

This is just the sort of thing my colleagues and I avoid, and try to help companies we work with avoid. There should _always_ be a stack of useful projects available for just such lag periods, to keep people engaged and to do work that didn't fit into the priority meeting. Whether it's evaluating the next software upgrades, training people on software they need everyday, or clearing away obsolete hardware and software before it fails during deployment. If there is not enough such work available to fill in the gap time, you're overstaffed and should look for another department that needs you more or prepare your resume.

If nothing else, _cross-train_. And be aware the sharpest, most aggressive of you may migrate to a better paying role or get shoved up to management, so help them move on and get ready to take their place as the senior engineer.

Re:the title that just wont die

[__aaclcg7560]

The fat fuck can't even correct his own bio on here!

You seem to enjoy bitching about it, I left it as is for now. It's not like you have anything better to do with your life.

Re:the title that just wont die

[__aaclcg7560]

If there is not enough such work available to fill in the gap time, you're overstaffed and should look for another department that needs you more or prepare your resume.

That's the funny thing. The team I work on is the smallest out of the entire project. Most teams have an extra 20 people doing the same amount of work. We built up an extensive library of scripts and knowledge base articles that help us get the job done faster each month. Something that the other teams are not interested in. When the contract gets put out for rebidding in a few years, many of these teams will get downsized.

Re:the title that just wont die

[__aaclcg7560]

You're like a cockroach in the hold speculating what the captain of the ship will do next.

The annual all hands meeting is probably the one time I'm not multitasking by running scripts and writing Slashdot comments.

Re:the title that just wont die

[__aaclcg7560]

What some people might call "wasting your employer's time", you conveniently re-frame as "multitasking".

As an IT support contractor, management can tell me what work needs to be done. They just can't tell me how to get that work done. Otherwise, I would be classified as an employee under IRS rules. As long as the work is done, no one cares how I get it done. For some jobs, I can get everything done in the first hour and management is fine with that.

Any reason you haven't been replaced by a script?

A script can't fix a broken system that need repairs. I typically have ~20 systems per day that need repairs.

Re:the title that just wont die

[__aaclcg7560]

Because for somebody in IT to NOT know what Slashdot is, but know and use Reddit, suggests that they're twenty-something year olds fresh out of college with maybe a few years of experience under their belts.

Slashdot is relic of the dot com bust in 2001 and ranks #5,555 on Alexa. Reddit was founded in 2005 and ranks #9 on Alexa. Seems like Reddit is more popular than Slashdot these days.

The only reason I knew about Slashdot was that I worked at a video game company where many of testers read Blue's News, Slashdot and The New York Times.

Re:the title that just wont die

[ls671]

A script can't fix a broken system that need repairs. I typically have ~20 systems per day that need repairs.

Well, if they had been repaired right the first time, there might not be so many to repair everyday.

Re:the title that just wont die

[__aaclcg7560]

Well, if they had been repaired right the first time, there might not be so many to repair everyday.

Tell that to Adobe, Microsoft and Oracle. If the last update or patch failed to remove old registry keys, it will block this month's update or patch from installing. Or upgrading licensed software requires a site tech to coordinate with the user to update. Or the SCCM client decides not to talk to the server to get updates anymore. Or maybe the system was decommissioned, taken offline and wasn't removed from the SCCM database. Or the system that supposed to be behind an ACL is on the general network instead. And that's just a typical day.

Next month we're switching from Windows 7 to Windows 10. Woo-hoo! Job security!!

Re:the title that just wont die

[ls671]

And you are, lets say as an example; a relic of the pre-2000 spammers.

Something is a relic. Understood?

Re:the title that just wont die

[__aaclcg7560]

To suggest that a 40-50 year old IT guy with 20+ years of IT experience would have "never heard of" Slashdot, while at the same time, being an active contributor on Reddit, is a pretty big stretch.

I'm not suggesting. I asked my coworkers. They have never heard of Slashdot.

A link back to my website 20 years ago would have generated 3,000+ clicks from Slashdot. Ten years ago, 300+ clicks. Today, 30+ clicks. Ten years from now, three or less clicks. Slashdot has been dying for a very long time.

Re:the title that just wont die

[__aaclcg7560]

Really? Your co-workers don't notice that website on your screen 67% of the day?

My co-workers are scattered across the US. The only people who come into my office are those who are conducting an IT inventory.

Re:the title that just wont die

[__aaclcg7560]

Then how do you know if they've heard of Slashdot or not?

Because we're all on the same conference call for eight hours a day. Not only do I have to multitask running scripts and writing Slashdot comments, I have to listen to the 30 voices in my head(set).

Re:the title that just wont die

[__aaclcg7560]

So they've managed to isolate their "miracle worker" safely away from the productive staff, and cleverly stashed you in a storage room and called it your office.

That's because I'm regional and not local. Plus my office has a window with an excellent view of the roof.
https://twitter.com/cdreimer/status/858056822648750080

Re:the title that just wont die

[ls671]

Listen dude, the guy has explained everything;
"It is because he is regional and his office has a window with a view of the roof"

Period, that's it, that explains and justifies everything.

I believe that we now have strong enough evidence to close the case.

Re:the title that just wont die

[__aaclcg7560]

You're right. It perfectly explains that he knows everything about his 30 co-workers that speak to him at the same time, while being in a smaller group than the other teams of 20 people.

My co-workers and I have been working together for three years. You can learn a lot by listening to the people whom you work with on a daily basis. Our team has 30 people. Other teams have 50 to 75 people. We all do the same amount of work.

They don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

"Nearly half (47 percent) of companies will pay for employees to become open-source certified."

So nearly half of the companies are incompetent, then!

You don't get open-source certified anywhere. Unless they actually look at your portfolio of open-source contributions. There is no certification instance. Look at Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman - neither is "open-source certified", although they define large parts of the open-source landscape.

Re:They don't understand

[arth1]

You don't get open-source certified anywhere.

It depends. You can get certified by various companies (like Red Hat) for using their particular open source products. But general open-source certified, no.

Some job seekers are open-source savvy and definitely certifiable...

Re:They don't understand

[rnturn]

Was "open source certification" something that the pollsters brought up? If so, the whole report is questionable. If it was something that the people who participated in the poll, that may make a lot of folks want to know who all these people were and what companies they work for. They may wish to cross them off the list of companies they'd like to work for.

And my studies show

[rsilvergun]

young, attractive women want more rsilvergun. Now I wonder if I can get a job at the Linux Foundation doing studies...

What is an 'Open Source' worker?

[grumpy-cowboy]

A developer who doesn't use Visual Studio/Oracle DB/...?
A developer who will take his employer source code and drop it on GitHub?

A developer is a developer. Using Linux/Postgres/OpenLDAP/... doesn't make you an "Open Source" developer.

Re: What is an 'Open Source' worker?

[reanjr]

No it isn't bro. You're thinking of VS Express I think.

Re:What is an 'Open Source' worker?

[Antique Geekmeister]

> Visual Studio is free bro.

The lessons it teaches are not: they can cost years of employment and thousands of hours of painful labor to unlearn destructive lessons.

Re:No, they don't.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't sell open source

Yes you can sell open source software under various licenses. However, you have your terms confused.

Free software is a subset of open source software often licensed under the GPL. There is nothing in the GPL that says you can't sell the software. When you transfer your binaries, however , the GPL license requires that you provide your customers with four freedoms:

The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

You can sell software using other licenses, such as BSD and Apache. Both meet the definition of Open Source, but do not convey the rights listed above. In fact, these licenses allow you to relicense the code as proprietary. For instance, a quote from the Apache license:

You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and may provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use, reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or for any such Derivative Works as a whole, provided Your use, reproduction, and distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated in this License.

This is how Apple has legally built it's operating system on top of the Mach kernel and BSD Unix. They sell it, and they have relicensed it. A person contributing significant code to these projects is therefore unable to acquire their own source code from Apple. This loophole renders these licenses as non-free.

Re:Wtf is "open source professional"

[arth1]

What does it mean? Someone willing to work with open source? Someone willing to write it? How does skillset differ from closed source professional or blue tie professional?

Someone who can help management get something for nothing. People who can understand the licenses and allow the company to use as much as possible without paying for it, while avoiding the pitfall of in-house software becoming open source because someone was lazy.
Ideally, someone who can also eke free support out of open source, getting others to fix bugs for free.

Re:Slashdot going to pot again

[arth1]

Do you miss the old days when Dice.com owned Slashdot?

Sometimes I do, yes.
At least you knew where you were with Dice.com. They didn't make a lot of promises they didn't keep. Better the devil you know, and all that..

must be former IBM marketers

[superwiz]

IBM managed to convince Cobol programmers that the world is divided into "mainframe" programmers and "PC". This is so inculcated into their brains that many of them still use those terms. I am not sure if a smart phone is an IBM or a PC, but IBM mainframe Cobol harkens back to the days when the entire os memory model allowed for no more than 640K of memory. But as long as you convince everyone who is willing to listen that not being one of "yours" is one of "others", you are golden. Just sprinkle some "open source" dust on it and it'll owrk. Oh, go ahead. Show me how to compile (open source) Docker with the network cable pulled out.

Re: No, they don't.

[F.Ultra]

And you just ignore that Stallman financed himself and FSF in the early years by selling GPL licensed software? His plan has never been about the price of software.

Re: No, they don't.

[andre.gompel]

"When the wise point his finger to the moon, the idiot looks at the finger". Pixel had very low return of investment, for ten years. Few "glorified account" with silly titles would have seen any value, in what turned out to be a gold mine. Stevens job did... and stroke gold. Pragmatism is for the mentally challenged. Understanding for the wise and smart. A.G

Re: Difficulty in finding quality talent? Bullshit

[andre.gompel]

Could not agree more. Furthermore, almost no one in HR understand engineering.

Re: No, they don't.

[Anonymous Coward]

All of those things apply to proprietary software too. And in top of that you need a team of lawyers to negotiate contacts plus full time staff, expensive tools and often nasty workarounds just to manage license compliance alone.

Re: No, they don't.

[dougdonovan]

employers want...but are not willing to pay.

Re: No, they don't.

[LynnwoodRooster]

Quick question: do you bring home your gross pay or your net pay? If you have a gross income of $100,000 per year, but your living expenses are $110,000 per year - is that a good thing? Gross margin is irrelevant.

Re: No, they don't.

[LynnwoodRooster]

Redhat has been around 24 years, and went public back in 1999 - 18 years ago. They aren't really that new, nor is what they are offering. It's been around for a generation. And I assume you mean Pixar, not Pixel? Pixar was a money loser until they partnered with Disney, and that's the reaosn Disney ultimately bought it. Until it was hired by Disney to do Toy Story, Pixar was slowly losing employees, shedding about 60% of its workforce - and all its hardware lines - over the course of 10 years or so.

There is no difficulty in finding workers

[RhettLivingston]

There are many more qualified programmers sitting on the sideline than they need. The problem is not that it is difficult to find workers. It is that it is difficult to find workers who will work for the low wages that they want to pay, especially if it requires moving to some of the ridiculously expensive locations they insist on placing their operations in.

They know this and often advertise jobs that they have no intent to pay to fill to create the illusion that there is a shortage. This helps in their case to bring in more offshore talent that will undercut wages.

They have the money as shown by their profits and the outrageous wages paid to those higher up the chain.

Somehow, the normal capitalist formula that says wages should rise to balance the supply has been broken. I believe it is largely due to them having enough success to not care and a reduction in the consumer's pickiness on product quality and features. I'm sure there are other factors.

Re:No, they don't.

[DidgetMaster]

So when your revenue model is 'give away the software and sell the support', how much incentive is there to build a great product that is easy to install and understand and has few bugs? It seems to me that anything that would cut down on the need for support would get a low priority. Maybe it is just me.

Re:WTF is open source certified?

[RhettLivingston]

It is one of the mechanisms created in the last couple of decades to magnify the appearance that there is a lack of people qualified for the work. Just come up with a new certification, claim that there is a shortage of people who have it (there is because why would someone with decades of experience get it), and beg the government to let in more cheap workers.

Re: No, they don't.

[Reverend Green]

'Cuz tweeting is far more valuable than actually making software.

Re: No, they don't.

[kwbauer]

What is with the extraneous "an"?

Re:No, they don't.

[Z80a]

I imagine that gets easier to judge a good candidate from a bad one when you can actually read his code.

Re: No, they don't.

[TheRaven64]

Market value for the software, or a copy of the software? There are two parts involved in software development: writing the software and copying it. Writing it costs money, copying it is essentially free. Open source makes it harder to charge money for copying software, but makes it easy to charge money for writing it. In contrast, proprietary off-the-shelf software involves writing software for free and then charging to make copies of it. Which do you think makes more economic sense?

Re:WTF is open source certified?

[rnturn]

Most of the certifications that have been suggested to me over the years have been part of a racket. 1.) Pay $$$ to take the course and get the certification. 2.) If you lucky, your employer gives you a token raise because you're magically more valuable. The raise pays for the cost of obtaining the certification over a three year period. 3.) Certification is only good for three years. Return to step 1. Nice treadmill this cottage industry has created.

If step 2 never happens--and lately that is more than likely going to be the case--then you just out the $$$ and for what?

Re: Of course they do

[eric_harris_76]

"Shortage" means either the people griping don't want to pay what the sellers are asking (whether it be software developers or fidget spinner makers), or the sellers have for some reason not chosen to charge all the market will bear (because they don't want to seem like dicks, they goofed on pricing or quantity, or there's a law against it).

Pony up the money and buy that Tickle Me Elmo on the, ahem, "secondary market", or pay people what it'll take to get them to work for you, or whatever, or quit yer griping.