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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?"
We're having difficulty finding someone who is a blockchain expert with 5+ years in Lightning Network experience.
HR won't let us hire anyone with less, and demands at least 2/3s of new Engineering hires be non-white non-male.
The most difficult IT hires are the dev/admin/whatever with 20 years of experience willing to work for minimum wage. Woe is the poor cheap-ass employer.
The reason Iâ(TM)ve not taken many it jobs is pay. They want a skilled and talented professional who stays current and they think $75k is a fair salary for that. I do not agree so I work for much more where I am and stay put.
"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.
This cuts both ways, for positions and candidates.
When a phrase becomes a buzz word, it means whatever whoever wants it to mean, but they have to have it in resumes/job postings to look hip.
If you put one of them in criteria, congratulations, every resume on the planet is applicable. Not becuase people have relevant skills, but because people will find any way they can to justify putting it on. The diluted meaning means there's probably some way people can work it in to their resumes.
It's also a warning sign to see in a job posting. If a company is seeking a buzzed skillset, it is more likely than not they have no idea what they are doing and have no good reason to even be poking about in the area, but some management person read enough articles saying that a business *must* do this to stay relevant.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It is hard to find good AI people, because AI does not exist. All you have are algorithms and clever parlor tricks. The hardest people to find are people who will work in Silicon Valley for $50,000.
It may sound stupid, but for whatever reason, people tend to get complacent in software development or server administration roles. Very few candidates will break out and learn things outside of their "expertise", even if they should go hand-in-hand.
A good example: my current organization has many .NET developers, but very few who can actually write SQL statements or even query AD. It's very frustrating to see them struggle on things that they "should" know.
but in America, none outside of the really high end stuff that isn't really IT, it's math. I guess it's a little hard to get competent folks to work a 24/7 NOC because companies don't want to have enough people on staff that the hours don't suck so you end up with 12 hour swing shifts 3-4 days a week. Aside from that outsourcing + H1-Bs have meant there's a glut of cheap labor.
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" can feel a bit like trying to capture a unicorn... "
No problem, there are lots of virgins in the IT world.
...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.
(Read that title again carefully before responding.)
Lots of Indians have this amount of experience on their resumes. Why not Americans? :)
Seriously, anyone with a solid foundation in STL and C++03 could pick up Boost or the latest features in C++0x, but HR and managers don't want to hear it.
I'm an engineer and have often been called a cad.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Yet another article written by a soft-skills proponent (aka management) who try so hard to justify their own existence.
At the end of the day none of the people you write about need you.
But hey, someone needs you write this drivel to make themselves feel relevant.
In smaller companies, discovered that cultural fit is the hardest to satisfy, above and beyond finding the matching skill set.
I’m sure that’s different in larger companies.
AC comments get piped to
... problem in 2 weeks for an hourly rate of no larger than 25$.
Those are really difficult to come by. We have been looking for 3 for ages.
A close second are those people that can make us happy even if we don't know what we want but we know exactly how much it may cost and when it's supposed to be finished. Tough one too that is. These IT and programming experts are so arrogant and really hard to work with.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
If you can't find a "data scientist", try hiring a "statistician" instead. It just might work!
I'm currently in the job market. Many of the ads I'm seeing are extensive, detailed, collections of technologies and skills but only 3-5 years experience. What's worse is how often there is no clear distinction between what is truly essential and what is a "plus".
This kind of posting selects against the honest, and anyone with more than a mild case of Impostor Syndrome.
Oh, ad might catch the unicorn's attention, but if the applicant truly has the extensive experience asked for - why would they work for YOUR company?
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.
The trend I've noticed is that companies prefer to hire someone who can't easily move to another company, yet have the option of terminating employment for any reason whatsoever (i.e. an extreme version of employment-at-will) For example, this is why they prefer H-1B and contingent employees. H-1B's can move, but it's a lot of work on the part of the H-1B employer. Since they are locked in, the company can pay them less. Contingent workers can be easily let go without the worries of the employee suing the company, or having to pay for pesky things like health insurance, vacation, holidays, unemployment insurance, and worker's compensation.
As for off-shoring to overseas locations. The problem companies face is that most of the rest of the developed world has stricter labor laws and better contingent worker protections then the US, as well as single payer health care and statutory vacation laws. Also employment-at-will is an alien concept all developed countries and in most emerging economies such as China. Salaries in the developing countries are also on the rise.
By using H-1B and temporary workers and employing them in the US, the company can avoid paying market rates for labor and have a captive workforce which can be increased or reduced at a moment's notice which makes the bean counters, and investors happier.
The problem is this tactic only works if there is a good supply of H-1B and contingent workers to be exploited. We need better protections for H-1B and contingent employees in the US, as well as a reform/harmonization of "Employment-at-will so that workers are not taken advantage of, and the global talent pool truly operates as a free market.
Data "Science" looks like nothing but dressed up Statistics to me. Hire a Statistician, the tech isn't too hard. The tech was built for monkeys.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
HR and recruiters work hand in hand to ensure that companies get the worst possible candidates. The problem is keyword matching. Recruiters spam them, and HR filters on them. That directly penalizes someone who either has a very strong or narrow skillset, or someone who has a very high adaptability.
As someone who hires, I either want someone who can bring expertise to the table, or can quickly understand and adapt to what we do, without training. What the combination of HR and recruiters come up with is rarely any of those. A keyword match won't tell whether you've merely been exposed to something or have real expertise, and a missing keyword does not mean you can't do that.
Working with HR and recruiters to better convey what you need is important, but it's near impossible to get them to not put so much faith in keyword matching.
Basically everything coming our way lately stinks of entitled millennial
Translation: we want to pay shit wages with shit working conditions and those little ingrates won't work for us when they can get better conditions or better wages elsewhere.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
I disagree. HR, increasingly, works for itself. At my employer, HR foisted on us an ENTIRELY new system of Job Titles and Pay Grades. Which is not just useless, but required the hiring of approximately 10 more people at Corporate to manage it.
All, of course, reporting to the Chief Human Capital Officer.
We appear to be seeing Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy metastasize in real time. . .
the right candidate can feel a bit like trying to capture a unicorn
That is 100% correct and that's because companies and more specifically HR doesn't deal with reality. Unicorn basically means looking for a person with a combination of skills, abilities and experience that either doesn't exist or is extremely RARE (< .01% of the population) This idea that every tech company could put out a job requisition for an infinite amount of time and eventually snag a unicorn is not even remotely based in reality. Companies need to put the crack pipe down and start dealing in reality and adjusting their expectations accordingly just like we all do. No one gets special treatment.
We'll make great pets
The IT field is swamped with semi-competent and outright incompetent people. People who have an understanding of engineering that stops at "it worked when we tested it", that do the most outrageously stupid things that cause bizarre failures later on. People that are incapable of reading documentation. People that do not even know the basics about technology they use daily to build applications. And so on.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"Technical Fad Coordinator"
Table-ized A.I.
I know a doctor who has the same problem hiring docs for his practice. For some crazy reason, new docs want a life outside of work - many are women and want a family too. They don't care if they make less - (they realize they can have a real nice life on $150,000/year and pay their loans and they don't need to make $500,000/year) The doc can't understand that yes, it IS possible.
I have one of those millennials you're complaining about. He learned from Dad that devoting yourself to the company gets you nowhere in the long run. The owner will devote himself 24/7 to the company because it's his - and that's his right and it's necessary to build something.
But to expect others to do the same for just a paycheck is unreasonable. And many folks work to live: not live to work.
You know why folks die so soon after retirement? Because their identity and life revolved around work. And in the tech profession, our career lifespans are nowhere near other professions.
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.
I like to understand how a professional arrived at their current level of stated understanding. Rather than the technology experts I expect, I find experienced users with a lack of basic knowledge.
Examples include data scientists with no domain knowledge, applcation performance analysts with no understanding of bytecode virtual machines, real systems architecture or even performance modeling, or network/systems administrators who canâ(TM)t explain a TCP handshake.
just don't trust anyone enough.
At the best, you get offloaded to a benefit dodging staffing agency, at worst get nothing due to not being the perfect person.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
I'm so glad that New York exists, because otherwise we'd have to come up with someplace to put all the New Yorkers.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
But the true unicorns are candidates who can not only deepen their bench of tech skills but keep an eye on the bottom line.
So the true unicorn is someone who does everything and costs nothing? Pretty sure that isn't just desired in tech.. Not overly surprised they're having trouble finding such people..
But, first, you need people who are capable of writing documentation. When companies stopped including actually helpful printed documentation--or, hell, a CD full of PDFs--prepared by professional technical writers (as opposed to foisting the task on the coders who can barely cobble together a coherent paragraph), the reading of documentation became known as a waste of time. "It's on their web site." Is it? Usually it's not. In some cases, it might be there but buried in a horribly managed wiki that sometimes contains conflicting information depending on how you navigate the damned thing.
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Uh no. If I can complain about anything at this job, shit wages AIN'T it.
No. We need people who are self-starters, don't need to be hand-held. can solve problems without constant oversight, and who deal well with customers.
And if they can find better working conditions and wages someplace else doing what we require here, we TELL THEM to take it.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Then there are:
* the recruiters who balk at the length of your resume because of all the keywords you packed it with in an attempt to satisfy the ATS.
* the HR people who write articles that warn candidates to ``keep it to a single page because we only spend 5 seconds looking at your resume''.
$DIETY help you if you've worked at more than one company and try to satisfy both of these types at the same time.
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At least not yet.
I've seen the job ads without the laundry lists of technologies--you've seen 'em: lists that seem to indicate they're trying to fill three open positions with a single hire (sysadmin, DBA, developer)--and that's great.
The trouble is, though, that the word hasn't trickled down to the actual hiring managers and their lieutenants doing the interviewing. The actual interviews are endless questions like "have you used this/that/the other/what version/etc?" which puts the candidates on the defensive just moments after "Hello" and the handshake and leaving little time to talk about how the candidate's background would fit in and help to solve the company's problems. To the interviewers, they're already turned off by the fact that your previous or current employer chose to use different software products than the company has chosen. "Oh my God... this guy doesn't know any of the software we chose to build our business processes on. Next! (Damn! Maybe we can get Joe to come back...)"
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I've recently graduated with a degree in Information System, and for some reason, every job I search for keeps asking for significant amount of experience using hardware that I haven't touched, let alone afford to use, or at least have some kind of IT/IS experience. When I had two terms left to go (I was being retrained under the US Trade Acts program), I started looking for internship opportunities, only to find I was running into the same issue: experience with hardware or software that no one without a significant amount of money can reasonably afford. Another option, I found, that might help open doors is to get some help desk experience, and I'm finding plenty of those. I just can't get any of them because I can't use a phone (I'm deaf, by the way), and offering to take up email and online chat support results in a "Yeah, no.. we need someone to answer phones.". By the time I was finished with school, my trade acts check ended, and I ended up going back to my previous line of work; manufacturing. I'm now building chip foundry tools that goes to Intel, Samsung, and a host of other microchip manufacturers, and every day I come home, looking for work, I keep running into that inane experience requirements. I thought internship was supposed to teach and train people to get those experience, so why are they asking for significant experience? Oh right, AS/BS/MS degree, shit wages, if any. So, how does one like me get past the HR barrier, and actually find work? Even claiming some experience with my homelab isn't enough, because I've not any experience using an expensive Cisco hardware in said homelab.
This couldn't be further from the truth. One of the first half-dozen episodes of Talking Machines devotes about fifteen minutes to answering this question.
Statisticians deal in quantities which have physical units that can be interpreted in the real world.
Data scientists build models, generally using unsupervised learning, that have no defined units, and can't be interpreted in the real world, but can be used for reasonably accurate prediction (here Ryan Adams defines classification as a prediction task).
And it isn't built for monkeys, because subtle meta-parameters determine whether your training run will converge somewhere useful, or not.
Once a freshly minted PhD stick handles the model into the sweet spot, the monkey factor goes way up. In fact, the monkey factor goes up so much that this phase of product maintenance (it's more like maintenance than development) is largely automated, with few monkeys required.
With your cognizance of the field, I rate you as below replacement monkey.
the hours make it hard to have a life. It's generally 12s. 3 two weeks then 4 the next. Meaning a 48 hour shift once a week. Most cities that have tech jobs also have long commutes. Meaning you spend 3-4 days doing nothing but work. It's hard to have a life like that. Borderline impossible if you're stuck on the graveyard shift.
Companies could compensate by paying more, but they just don't do that anymore. They just live with the problems. So you get a mix of old guys that can't get hired anywhere else (being old in tech sucks), incompetents and the occasional young guy that doesn't last. If you're one of the competent old guys your life is hell because you're the one stuck holding the fort down while the incompetents do what incompetents do and they young guys spend their time studying for their next job.
While this is going on your bosses are trying to find a way to make your job obsolete with better software & outsourcing; so every other week you've got new software in beta form that's supposed to make your job easy enough for the incompetents. Your bosses know the team's a mess and can't do their jobs but the last thing they're gonna do is pay enough to get an entire crew of competent people.
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Yes and no. What we're really doing is playing off the ability for the human economist to creatively apply their knowledge to come up with new models to fit a handful of data points, against the computer's ability to fit millions if not billions of data points against a more rigid model.
But even assuming the economist is still "better" in some fashion even with the vast difference in the amount of data points used to generate their models, the NN still has one massive advantage: It can be copied. If you need to have an "expert" at each of three different data centers.. then hiring people means 3 different individuals would need to be found and hired (probably at a super high wage if they're good.) Whereas you only need to hire one NN guy to create his system and then copy it three times.
This becomes even more prominent if you're talking about consumer products. Something like Siri needs to have thousands if not millions of instances spun up and shutdown in order to process all of the requests from the millions upon millions upon millions of iPhone users in the world. Can you imagine if you asked Siri where the nearest Italian restaurant was and off at Apple HQ, there was some dude in the basement searching through the phone book manually in order to give you a response? That's just beyond absurd.
The problem is scale. You post an ad to something like Monster.com and you can expect probably a few thousand resumes to come flooding in. That gives you two choices: Hire a handful of people (who probably don't have domain knowledge anyway) to sort through the crud over a few days, or automate the process and pass it all through a computer to do in a couple of minutes. Guess which one is more cost-effective?
Its the automatic processing that causes most (but definitely not all) of these problems. Keyword matching is easy. Distilling the essence of a document is not so much. So we're now in a bit of an arms race where job postings are a list of arbitrary and often irrelevant keywords, and resumes are just a copy of the list as best as the applicant can stretch their "skills" in order to cover the posted list. There's not a whole lot of meaning to either anymore (perhaps there never was..)
There's no real easy answer here. Its too time-consuming to go through all of the resumes manually. All I can think of is waiting until AI advances enough that it can start parsing through cover letters and non-bullet-point parts of the resume in order to get a fuller view of the applicant. But I wouldn't expect that terribly soon. In addition to being a hard problem in terms of the AI tech, there's also little incentive to do it: The longer it takes you to find the "perfect" employee, the longer you're going to be using the recruiter's service. As long as they're doing good enough to not lose your business, they don't have much reason to improve their matching system.
Yeah, same thing is happening in the Portland area. Entry level with a lot of required experience. It's almost as if the company wants entry level for the company, not the actual experience level.
In the words of a former boss of mine "Good, available, no police record. Pick two".
It gets better now that there are actually university courses teaching IT-security, then again, it just ain't the same material, not the same mindset that you find in the old peeps.
Maybe 'cause back when I was young, the only ones you could actually hire were the ones that were actually good enough to not get caught (and thus have no record)...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
finding people who actually understand statistics as opposed to just claiming that they do.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
but they want it cheap. You have to have at least 20 different skills but they will only pay $80K/yr.
There's no real easy answer here. Its too time-consuming to go through all of the resumes manually.
Some ideas:
- Set aside a couple of hours of a non-HR person to pick through random resumes and put a couple in the "check these" stack.
- Have a computer algorithm compare resumes and bump the score of those outside the norm, and reduce the score of those that have the most similarity. That would likely get rid of a lot of the keyword spamming cookie cutter resumes.
- Allow negative keywords. If I want to hire someone who can write an embedded database inside 64k, it might we worth searching for "database" and then score down those who also say "access" or "mssql". And If I want a good Linux sysadmin, I would like to score down anyone who says "Ubuntu" but not any EL flavor, because chances are higher that they only have user experience and would waste my time. Even if it excludes some good matches, it will likely exclude more bad matches.
Common spelling mistakes would also be good for negative keywords. Someone who writes "pearl" or "kernal" and can't be bothered to proof-read their CV is probably not someone worth interviewing.
From what I hear, there are boatloads of aging, experienced IT pros that nobody else will hire because of their age. You're telling me you can't find any of those guys, even though you're offering substantial money?
I don't know your company or your job ads. But what you've written could well read as:
No. We need people who are self-starters,
Offering no on the job training.
don't need to be hand-held. can solve problems without constant oversight,
or mentoring
and who deal well with customers.
And multi-skilled.
And if they can find better working conditions and wages someplace else doing what we require here, we TELL THEM to take it.
While you're busy bashing milennials, what you've said is you're hiring younger workers. You're wanting them to be able to do a lot out of the gate.
So there's one of two potential problems. Either you need to hire more expensive and experienced older workers or your job ads suck so you're putting off any decent younger workers because they're reading the ads like I am.
The fact you're ragging on milennials indicates to me though that the problem is with you, not them.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
And naive enough to work for next to nothing.
So basically you want skilled, experienced, works who are willing to work for less money than they're worth. And you think you're reasonable.
YOU are why America is failing. We've gone from a situation where, 50 years ago, a person could walk into a job as a teenager, learn, become skilled, and end up retiring on a reasonable income, to today, where employers are proud to underpay their employees, aren't willing to invest a cent in them, and are happy to see them leave.
Everyone bitches about millennials, but quite honestly, as a GenXer, I saw this coming, we were part of the first generation that had to put up with this bullshit, and we saw these complaints about us too. Because we resented incompetent short sighted business owners who sold the farm and then complained when we weren't suited to the crumbs. But we had the last laugh - my generation pretty much invented the Internet, which, combined with the shortage of suitable employees for Boomer-run businesses, was a disaster for them.
Shape up. Continue with your entitled attitude, and you'll end up destroyed, and rightly so.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I defeat this system by listing, in separate categories, every skill I've heard of, but explicitly separated out by those I know well, those I know less well, and those I've only at most played around with. The computer sees them all and screens me out of none. A human being on the other hand will see whether the majority of what they are looking for falls into the "knows well" category, or the "just played with." I don't like to have to do this. It does feel mildly deceptive and dishonest in that I'm giving myself an advantage over others who haven't figured this out. But in the end I am always going to be honest and straightforward with any human being who interviews me. There's no reason not to. I'm going to crash and burn on a new job anyway if I pretend to have 25 years' experience in Perl when it looks to me like line noise. But I don't want to be passed over for the job that's an otherwise perfect fit but requires some very occasional Perl. If there is deception here, at least some of it IMO falls on employers and their screening tools, for trying to screen people out of jobs for which they might actually be an excellent fit.
Nonaggression works!
The biggest problem in IT is finding people who are actually qualified to work in real IT environments.
The majority of the people I've worked with, have either grossly overestimated their skill levels or flat out made them up. I've lost count on how many times I've had someone try and hold their years in IT or title over me and claim that proves their skill levels, then they've failed to login to a server via SSH (which really happened from TWO CTO's).
The problem, I find, is qualification and finding people with real skill.
1: No. Job requirements and goals are discussed, EXTENSIVELY, during the hiring process. We're not a training facility. So we hire people who are supposed to be experts (and pay commensurately). Also, there's an initial break-in period to make sure that these people can conform to the job expected of them.
2: This is what the break-in is for. And it's not as if help simply CANNOT be asked for if problems arise.
3: How is "can solve problems without constant oversight" translated into "surrounded by micro-managers"? I'm talking about people who literally freeze the second someone questions them at something more than a superficial level about something that's supposed to be their field of expertise.
4: No, should be technical with good self-management skills and the ability to be polite on the phone. Hell, we even provide phones with a MUTE function in case a particularly insolulable situation arises and they feel the need to vent. But we've had recruits flip out on clients for things that were not the clients fault, swearing like a bunch of drunken sailors with no filters in every day life on a drunken bender, etc.
Sorry if my accurate descriptions of a bunch of unemployables in your target demographic hurts your fee fees.
Cope.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
1: Where do you get this idea that we're looking for people willing to work for less than they're worth? I never even mentioned compensation. YOU simply ASSUMED that. We know the type of candidates we want are not common. And the pay reflects that. This is why we tell people that if they can get paid more elsewhere for the same work, TAKE IT. We don't hold anyone back, and we won't waste time on somebody who's going to jump ship. Besides, the groups that pay more than we do are few and far between.
2: Bull. We don't have the time to devote to multiple months/years of training, just to have someone up and better-deal us the second they're trained. So we hire experts and pay for experts.
3: You're talking to a fellow GenX'er. And while I did note some of this in our generation as well, this sort of unemployable streak has really only blossomed in the last 10-ish years or so. It's not that we simply won't even look at millennials. We do. All the time. They simply don't tend to work out (for the reasons outlined), and we're busy enough that we don't have time to waste.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
"hard hires" are a self-inflicted wound. Multiple skills with significant experience are desired while expected to be young enough to work for entry level wages.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.