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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.
If demand is really greater than supply, then programmers should be able to ask for reasonable accommodation from employers (i.e. reasonable working hours and vaca time). If people actually showed a backbone, this has the potential to chance cultures.
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.
No, the constant whining that they can't find people shows that we're underpaid. The managerial class would rather suppress wages than get work done.
And why not? They just want to replace other workers with automated processes so it can wait until they find someone cheap who can barely pull it off.
Then they put that they saved the company a bazillion dollars by managing software as a chief executive project program manager architect and move into another management position at some other company before shit can hit the fan.
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...
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Options (3,4,5) leave the industry, go to academia, or even leave the US under a skilled-worker visa. If you have experience, you can also come back as a consultant, set your own hours, and charge 2-3x as much as if you were an employee. Thanks to Obamacare, in civilized states, everyone pays the same price for insurance regardless of pre-existing status.
... 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.
While technology firms are looking at compensation, they are also finding ways to create the supply of workers themselves, which helps hold costs down.
And this is why the bosses (as opposed to the usually sincere workers) at Google, Microsoft, etc. are all behind these "teach every person on Earth to code" programs.
I'm sorry if little Suzy doesn't want to code, but we need her to help keep down programmer salaries.
We'll know demand for programmers is up when salaries start rising for the first time in 15 years.
Lick those boots!
must be able to work 60-80 hours a week
I've demanded to be allowed to work from home for the last 8 years with an occasional few days a month in the office and gotten it.
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.
I'm a software engineer and I'm seeing much of a demand.
Maybe it's because you write buggy code that contains a lot of inverted logic errors.
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
Well, they certainly don't have a right to expect top notch people. Before I retired, I could do every job in our department. I could do it as well as the people who did it for their regular job. I'd put the time in and do the hard and odd jobs too. Some of the men were "job description" only, and almost none of the women would work overtime or travel. And they were all afraid to deal with the suits. So I'd pick up the slack.
Which is exactly why I was paid 3 times as much. If a person is competent enough and has the drive, they will do well.
People my age who thought I was some sort of suck-up or company man will have put in an extra twenty-four thousand hours by the time they retire - if they get to retire at the normal retirement age. That's 67 in my case - I retired at 55. Do good work, and be rewarded.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Thanks to Obamacare, in civilized states, everyone pays the same price for insurance regardless of pre-existing status.
BZZT! Bullshit.
My 33 year old daughter pays 10x as much as her siblings because of her pre-existing condition. The law says you can't be turned down because of a pre-existing condition, but it says nothing about being able to afford what is offered
The law restricts the spread between highest and lowest premiums for plans bought from an exchange to 1:3. And only allows rating based on age, location, and smoking status. In civilized states, the spread is often lowered to 1:1.
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
When my kids get their first part-time job as a teenager, I'm not expecting them to earn enough to live on. It should give them spending money, help them pay for car insurance, etc. And more importantly, the job should give them some experience working -- dealing with managers, coworkers, and customers who they may not like, showing up to work whether they feel like it or not, and doing what needs to be done even if it's not precisely in their job description. And it should probably be unpleasant enough to motivate them to do more with their life. An entry-level job at McDonalds might not be my first choice, but it would fit these requirements just fine.
If my kids are still working at McDonalds 10 years later, then I'm not going to be complaining that McDonalds doesn't pay them enough to live -- I'm going to tell my kids to do something with their life and get a real job that requires real skills. And that job will be worth a living wage.
Your comment is just the right kind of insight and cynicism. Lots of truth here. So is a career in software development not worth it in the long run?
There is a lot of truth to what is being said here, but like any humor is presents an over the top scenario ... in reality you can find many companies that are decent to work for, especially as another poster noted small to mid size businesses that are not start ups (say 20-100 employees). They are great if you really know what you are doing, because you can have a lot of variety to things you work on, and are very valued.
A software career is totally worth it in the long run IMHO. There are not many other jobs that have so much potential to be enjoyable by working on interesting problems. Sure you can get stuck doing some kind of morning maintenance stuff but all of that is really up to you and your ambition, your desire to make an interesting career from it... In fact I think it is one of the best possible careers, if you like programming.
Seems like it starts nice but quickly plateaus until you get older then you're replaced.
Maybe at some companies but again, if you have not let yourself stagnate you can always find work even when older. Sure some people go into management but that is not a must at all. Even the plateau is up to you, that is the point of stagnation and it is up to you to shift course and find the next hill.
Seems like it starts nice but quickly plateaus until you get older then you're replaced.
That is always a route if you tire of programming but you are much more expendable if you are in those areas.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.