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Google Starts Certificate Program To Fill Empty IT Jobs (axios.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: There are 150,000 open IT jobs in the U.S., and Google wants to make it easier to fill them. Today the company is announcing a certificate program on the Coursera platform to help give people with no prior IT experience the basic skills they need to get an entry-level IT support job in 8 to 12 months. Why it matters: Entry-level IT jobs are are typically higher-paying than similar roles in other fields. But they're harder to fill because, while IT support roles don't require a college degree, they do require prior experience. The median annual wage for a computer network support specialist was $62,670 in May 2016 The median annual wage for a computer user support specialist was $52,160 in May 2016. The impetus: Natalie Van Kleef Conley, head recruiter of Google's tech support program, was having trouble finding IT support specialists so she helped spearhead the certificate program. It's also part of Google's initiative to help Americans get skills needed to get a new job in a changing economy, the company told us.
They didn't say "entry-level" when reporting wages. Those are median wages for "computer network support specialist" and "computer user support specialist". So not "my first job on User Support" wages.
This is on par for the course with electricians and plumbers. The problem is in the 90-00s "VocTech" became a dirty word and *everyone* had to go to college.
This left a massive gap of people to fill that portion of industry which has been backfilled by H1Bs.
When the job board has jobs:
Most are made up by contract agencies so Kumar has a list of people he can call when he finds some 3 month contract in some bumfuck area of the US, paying $10 an hour, with no moving comp. Oh, it requires a CCIE or MCSE level person.
From there, you get the contract agencies advertising jobs in their own town, thinking people will move. No, if I live in Houston, I don't give a fucking rat's ass about a Plano job advertised as a local item.
Then, you get the bogus recruiters. The ones that want to find out where you work, so they can send your boss a note that you are looking to leave, and can the recruiter hire someone to replace you. Yes, I personally had that happen.
Then you have the places that will "interview" you with bogus job prospects, then start hard-selling you on their interview practice lessons for $1000 a week.
From there, you get the positions offered because a company has to offer them in public. In reality, they have someone in mind already selected, and you will just be wasting your time.
Now you are down at the actual prospects. The jobs that require a TS/SCI clearance. Well, unless you kept yours up after military service, you won't have one, and companies are not going to spend the time to clear you.
Then come the jobs that require a CISSP or top tier certs.
Then come, you get the positions with high turnover. Places where you get hired, and three months later, you are running for the door, or are shown the door. The DevOps job where the PM is a true narcissistic psychopath that demands stand-up meetings that run for hours, and then fires people because they are not getting any work done. Or the manager that wants another H-1B, so keeps asking people to do tasks with no budget, and when something breaks, they get tossed.
As for real jobs? Good luck. Those are found through friends and acquaintances.
That was my experience in Pennsylvania as well; east coast plus rust belt with all of the ridiculousness that implies.
I tend to receive many e-mails from foreign-sounding recruiters for very short-term contracts in strange locations like Arizona or Wyoming. The "interview" that's really a sales pitch for vo-tech only happened when I was right out of college. They kept calling until I bluffed them into thinking I was an attorney with a C&D on file.
Several more years into my career, I'm convinced that most "unfilled positions" are the high turnover type you mentioned. I had a run of those when I left a stalled public sector career. Some of them even whined about how hard it was to find good help but it wasn't "the help" holding them back.
From another post further down:
"The tech industry has many clueless people who are good at running their mouths, and get positions. If you are good, you wind up having people either scared of you, or just plain jealous... and even those people may be imbecilic at tech, they know damn well the exact spot between the ribs and shoulder blades to stab."
I found that to be very true. You're supposed to sell yourself in an interview and then, on the job, act as dumb as everybody else. You can't make suggestions for improvement or quietly do better in your own little corner. It's warped. Contract work doesn't pay well enough for me to be unemployed a few months between episodes.
Pretty much every time I look at an offer now, I get cold feet because I see so many warning flags. Development in particular is just awful these days. It used to be you had to know a language and maybe an OS or IDE. Now it's the framework du jour and other conditions that are basically set up for failure before you even start. They get a lot of people who don't understand what's going on at a lower level so many real solutions are immediately forbidden and then they're worked up that problems aren't resolved.
My favorite question these days is to see their style guide (I refuse to call it a code "standard" because it never is - it's an arbitrary set of selectively enforced typing patterns). Lots of places brag about having one...but none of them will actually show it to a prospective hire. So you arrive for your first day and find out everything's in Esperanto with reverse camel casing and a thousand build dependencies that aren't documented anywhere and now you're stuck. No thanks.
With stories I've heard from people I know on Google interviews, non-Indians need not apply for starters. They also seem to ask, in very thick accents, esoteric questions that just don't have any bearing on the job. I mean, look at the low quality beta software Google churns out and APIs that can't stay compatible between minor revisions. You can't tell me that was designed by somebody firing on all cylinders, let alone our industry's best and brightest.