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Demand For Programmers Hits Full Boil as US Job Market Simmers (bloomberg.com)
When the American job market heats up, demand for technology talent boils, an anonymous reader writes citing a Bloomberg report. From the story: Nationally, the unemployment rate was 4.1 percent in January, and analysts project that it declined to 4 percent, the lowest since 2000, in Labor Department figures due Friday. For software developers, the unemployment rate was 1.9 percent in 2017, down from 4 percent in 2011. While companies are writing bigger checks, they are also adopting new strategies to find engineers for an economy where software is penetrating even mundane processes. Companies are focusing more on training, sourcing new talent through apprenticeships, and looking at atypical pools of candidates who have transferable skills.
"It is probably the most competitive market in the last 20 years that I have been doing this," said Desikan Madhavanur, chief development officer at Scottsdale, Arizona-based JDA Software, whose products help companies manage supply chains. "We have to compete better to get our fair share." What's happening in the market for software engineers may help illustrate why one of the tightest American labor markets in decades isn't leading to broader wage gains. While technology firms are looking at compensation, they are also finding ways to create the supply of workers themselves, which helps hold costs down.
"It is probably the most competitive market in the last 20 years that I have been doing this," said Desikan Madhavanur, chief development officer at Scottsdale, Arizona-based JDA Software, whose products help companies manage supply chains. "We have to compete better to get our fair share." What's happening in the market for software engineers may help illustrate why one of the tightest American labor markets in decades isn't leading to broader wage gains. While technology firms are looking at compensation, they are also finding ways to create the supply of workers themselves, which helps hold costs down.
What is in extremely high demand is programmers with 20 years of experience in a technology that has been around for 5, no older than 19 and working for 20k a year.
And that demand will be high, forever.
Pay more and you get more. Pay this and what you get is code monkeys that couldn't find a better employer.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Because you think you're worth more than you really are? The McDonald's worker also feels that he/she is underpaid.
Mcdonalds workers are underpaid. No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country
If the market is so good for developers, why do very good programmers in their 60s, who have current skills, have such a hard time finding work?
As a devops engineer with 13 years experience, the job opportunities boil down to a few options:
startup: Web based and the oncall pool is, well, you. pay is decent but your boss is the same age you are and was drafted into the position so the company didnt lose him after 10 years to a competitor. a certified sociopath, your boss will treat you like a whipping boy while upper management blows vc cash on artisan kombucha on tap and vodka shots in the break room. bug reports will languish from your users, completely ignored, as your kanban scrum-bum stand ups quickly turn into sit downs full of hung over or jaded coders ordered to crank out feature after mindless feature.
enterprise: a multi million dollar faceless conglomerate so large your management team has its own newsletter to properly communicate what different groups in your department are doing. Every single idea you propose will be shot down because it didnt show up in a Gartner success quadrant and didnt come with a shiny presentation from some road warrior poured into a wrinkled suit from JC Penny. after 3 years your cynicism will be indistinguishable from personal affectation in most meetings. no one can be fired here unless theyre a meanie-bo-beanie because incompetence is par for the course. Get ready to explain mundane network concepts to your peers, and give brown bag presentations on git until the end of time, because these lifers are here until the second heart attack or the retirement kicks in and they arent about to rock the boat with Docker.
contracts.: typically 90 to 180 days, these specify that you must have a minimum 30 years experience in Rust, Dust, Crust, and the german enigma machine. Bonus points for understanding a 50 year old CMS/RCS/client-server application from a company that went bankrupt 12 years ago. perpetual contracts are either offered without question, or the company in question demands to convert you to full time staff after 3 months because short term contracts are the new hiring process for midwestern midsize manufacturing and callcenter/billing institutions that drive some of the most despicable parts of the american dream. Your raise is capped at 1% and education in the region for your kids is either underfunded suburban white mediocrity or some flat-earth megachurch.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Pussy.
Programmers don't realize they have more power over their employers than they think. One programmer being fired may be easy to replace. A group of five or ten working on a poorly-documented business-critical piece of software, not so much...
... are quite often clueless gimps in their 20s and 30s who don't understand the skills older people can bring - above and beyond years of coding experience - and assume they're slower and dumber than someone in their 20s who's all enthusiam but doesn't have much of a clue.
We'll know demand for programmers is up when salaries start rising for the first time in 15 years.
It smells too similar to the dot-com bubble for comfort. During the height of the dot-com bubble, co's didn't pay that well because they gave you stock options instead of big salaries as a signing bonus. And when the bubble popped, the market was flooded with programmers such that jobs were hard to find, at least on the west coast. Therefore, you had no savings because you got stock options that are now worthless, and you had no job. My legacy language experience was the only thing that saved me, and barely.
One could say "this time is different", but they also said that during the height of mortgage bubble, in terms of comparing that to the dot-com bubble. The reasoning was that homes had concrete value while dot-coms didn't. Didn't matter: the mortgage bubble created the second worse econ slump on record.
They are saying similar about AI: it's different from the AI bubble of the 80's because real and common products rely on AI now. That may be true, but as mortgages showed, that's not enough. And even if you are not in AI, an AI pop could affect rank and file IT because unemployed AI experts will flood non-AI IT job openings.
It may indeed be "different this time": a different path to misery. The only consistency is that if it smells bubbly, it probably is. The only real uncertainty is the size and scope of the poppage. Keep a rainy-day fund, people.
Table-ized A.I.
If you've been with a company for 20 years and aren't VP by now, you aren't going to ever move up.
I work for a large tech company (9K employees) and some of the people have been here from the start, 25 years. Many are directors, some are VPs, but most of them are still IC (individual contributor). Any they will remain IC until they retire.
And when women who have worked there for a fraction as long end up being their boss, I am sure they wonder why. But ultimately if you can't distinguish yourself quickly, you can't expect the promotions to come rolling in.
As an engineer who climbs the ladder. I believe you have two real choices:
1. Become an indispensable expert in your field with external visibility, and take on the ownership of large cross-functional projects that interact with multiple domains. This is the principal engineer title, and basically the top someone in the IC track can go with a few exceptions. Learning a bit of Python is not going to cut it. Getting your Six-sigma black belt is not going to cut it either.
2. Management. Demonstrate the functions of a manager. Not to your future subordinates, but to peer managers and to the immediate director. Again visibility out side of your own team is crucial.
Where this can go wrong:
* You have had the same role at a company for more than 5 years. Seniority in position hurts you usually unless you have some serious mentorship. (yes, us old guys still need mentors)
* A younger person, new hire, and/or woman can get mentorship more easily. And with that support and move right past you. Having some guidance and support to get into a management position is necessary to earn confidence in you from the directors and executives.