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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.
"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.
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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...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.
... 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
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.
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.
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
"Technical Fad Coordinator"
Table-ized A.I.
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.
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.
If you offer more money, you could get away with a lot less luck.
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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.
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.
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.