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What Are Today's Most Difficult IT Hires? (cio.com)
Slashdot reader snydeq shared an article from CIO:
The IT talent gap is driving up demand for skilled IT pros, but for certain roles and skillsets, finding -- and signing -- the right candidate can feel a bit like trying to capture a unicorn... AI and data science jobs are at the top of the list, in part because they're relatively young technologies, and they're being introduced in all sorts of companies going through their digital transformation. At the same time, there are some surprises... The experts we talked with name-checked a laundry list of desirable skills and needed experience with emerging areas like cognitive computing, machine learning, data analytics, IoT and blockchain. But the true unicorns are candidates who can not only deepen their bench of tech skills but keep an eye on the bottom line.
The article also cites high demand for data privacy experts, penetration testers with a scientific mind-set, and adaptable developers (including DevOps engineers), as well as experts in robotics and cryptology. But everyone's experiencing the job market differently, so the original submission ends with a question for Slashdot readers.
"What hires are you having the most difficulty making these days?"
The article also cites high demand for data privacy experts, penetration testers with a scientific mind-set, and adaptable developers (including DevOps engineers), as well as experts in robotics and cryptology. But everyone's experiencing the job market differently, so the original submission ends with a question for Slashdot readers.
"What hires are you having the most difficulty making these days?"
"AI and data science jobs are at the top of the list, in part because they're relatively young technologies"
Nothing particularly new in any of the fields mentioned. Specific frameworks in use are different now than they were 5, 10 or 20 years ago. However, speaking as someone who has been in IT for somewhere between 30 and 40 years, there's really not a lot that's fundamentally new. Mostly, we have added more turtles. What I do see is that each new generation re-invents old ideas and slaps new labels on them. Often, they even think the ideas are new, until some old grouch like me comes along and rains on their parade.
The last real sea change was the spread of the Internet in the 1990s - enabling worldwide networking (and worldwide attacks). The actual vulnerabilities being exploited, however, are old-hat. The top security risk today's web applications is injection? This has not changed in 20 years, which ought to be embarrassing for the entire IT profession.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
And to try and get them, they ask idiot "tech" recruiters who go after that "smell of success" by vgrepping for buzzwords.
Though there is some interesting (Chinese sense) variation:
penetration testers with a scientific mind-set,
Too many cowboys in "cyber security". Makes sense because all of "cyber security" consists of s'kiddies calling themselves "hackers" and bicker among themselves about hat colour. Finally figuring out this particular cottage industry sells mostly imperial textiles, eh.
and adaptable developers (including DevOps engineers),
I have sysadmin AND development experience, and that's always been a point against me, even before devops became a thing. Just like "can do" and "I don't know but I'll figure it out" attitude (a rather essential trait for generalist sysadmins) gets mentally filed under "attitude", not "can do". Thanks, HR drones.
Bitter, me? You bet, with reason well beyond being an occupational hazard for this line of work. But that isn't the point.
I say people selection is the most important thing, and so far "we" are doing poorly. Executives watching their people burn out is but a high point in this particular traveling crap shoot and shit show.
...are the most difficult hires.
I'm not young either, almost in my 50's - and still got hired in IT.
What surprises me though, is that our company have a habit of not hiring experienced staff, because they want to do the training and teaching themselves. We have a "teacher/mentor" culture in our offices meaning that when a new batch arrives, possibly with no knowledge of our infrastructure whatsoever - we train them meticulously. We have a high tolerance for failure (yes, most people will make mistakes, often quite expensive mistakes such as rebooting a server that has 100's of cash machines connected to it), but once they do that only ONCE - they'll likely never do it again. It's surprisingly effective. Also cost effective, as they get to be highly specialized and focused on our business and our customers.
The hardest ones to train, is the "experts". Completely age unrelated. Experts "knows so much" forehand, it becomes an uphill battle to explain to them everything. Some of them get offended that we imply that they "didn't know that" and it's almost like a mine-field trying to explain anything to people who know it all.
Fresh from the street - is the new IT gold. (And this comes from an almost 50 year 30+ in the IT business guy, me...who is as surprised as you probably are reading this), but it's quite true - I work in one of the biggest companies there is. I can't reveal who I work for as it's in my NDA, but if you work in a similar corporate, you'll totally get this.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
It is just not easy to get HR and C*s to want to pay them enough.
Therein lies the REAL issue.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Because lets face it, most project managers and project leads are pretty terrible picks.
So your architects end up hand holding and building the project plan and showing someone with elementary excel skills at best how to pull metrics (do their job too more or less).
And the architect needs a full stack background regardless of their area of expertise, otherwise you're just getting in the way of another architect who does have the full stack background.
And as others have pointed out already the expectation is that this unicorn work for minimum wage.
To salt the wound the diversity pick project manager gets paid more because somehow they are more important, even though the unicorn does their job for them in the end.
And finally if you've made it this far and you still want the job and are qualified, this will be the actual job experience for a modern young unicorn architect:
- Get hired
- Spend the first 2 weeks getting introduced to the water cooler (because politics)
- Get notified that the team is growing and 6 new people are joining, but none of them are here in the USA
- Get told that even though you specifically asked for a remote position and ended up taking a cube farm job anyway, that its OK that the guys in India are remote but it would not be OK for you to be remote
- Find out that this is because their plan is for YOU to help the diversity pick project manager build a project plan that the offshore guys will fullfil at night
Now your 9-5 unicorn full stack architect has transitioned into a management role for 26-32 hours of the week between meetings with the diversity pick project manager and meetings with the offshore guys and working on the project plan (instead of architecture).
With the remaining 8 hours a week that you have to do the job you actually hired on to do, you don't get anything done because:
- idiot managers take unicorn developers out of their natural habitats (bedrooms, closets, private rooms, garages, wherever is quiet)
- and try to stuff 300 of them in a sardine can cube farm
- so you can't even hear yourself think
- And dumb dumb diversity pick project manager says some dumb crap like "well I can deal with it, why don't you just bring some headphones?"
If you want to solve the talent shortage problem, fire the idiot project managers and quit making your 'talent' that you are short of manage teams of offshore slave labor.
By the way as someone who has had to manage offshore teams for over a decade for a variety of dumb reasons, CEOs, CTOs, and decision makers, keep this in mind as you get schmoozed by the next offshore cheap labor firm:
These off shore company's more often than not have the same problems that the on shore teams have. They have the same development, talent shortage, project management, and quality problems.
And like all business relationships go, you never hear about these problems. You just get the bill, and excuses of why you should have to pay for their shortcomings, f ups, and mistakes.
And you're not exposed to it, so its just plain expensive.
The company I am at now is paying over 400 offshore developers to do what would take no BS about 4-5 'talented' developers to do.
The company employs 20+ 'talented' architects but they are all managing offshore teams instead of developing.
Thats where your local talent is going, Off shore. And the 'off shore talent' you're trading the 'o shore talent' out for, is whole teams of often extremely amateur developers, plus inject a communication gap of neither side of the team can understand the other guys well (even though we all speak english).
There is no talent shortage. There is an excess of idiot managers though, many of which think that more cheap labor is better than more talented labor, because why else would they pay the remaining talent to manage the cheap labor?
And then whine about it to congress? Lol.
It's surprisingly hard to find technical trainers. Very few candidates make it through a phone interview, let alone an example teach. Admittedly it's an unusual combination of skills. We want people that have serious development chops, know multiple languages well (although no need to be perfect), and can teach. The pay, I believe, is good (I do it professionally). It's still stressful at times, but it's a different kind of stress. Agencies have been next to useless finding candidates because they understand none of the skills or how to screen for them. Many people in the tech world don't know these roles exist, or don't know what it takes, so if you're curious here's the kind of things you would need to do/be to make it through an interview, and land the job:
Technical
* Demonstrate clear fundamentals in your 'home' language, e.g. in Java I might ask about pass by value and how that affects code, or in C++ explore where and when you use the destructor. These are not obscure corner cases, although later stages of an interview could move to that but the technical interview is mostly done by then
* Demonstrate authenticity, e.g. have you experienced the stress of dealing with a 'sev 1' and survived to tell the tale
Teaching
* Can you stand up in front of people and engage them in learning
* Can you think on your feet and derive an answer from existing knowledge
* Can you admit when you don't know something, research the answer, and come back to the group
* Can you present information clearly
Last of all, can you do all of this with enthusiasm? I genuinely don't know if it's just a rare combination of skills, or we just can't find the people.