"Chinese and Indians really do work for lower pay than native engineers or other foreigners (e.g. Europeans)."
And, on average, work a few more hours per week (and year), though Americans work more than Europeans, and the statistical spread is bound to have over-laps. Jared Diamond suggested that it is a cultural thing resulting from traditional labor-intensive (3000 hours per year) wet-field rice cultivation (while Europeans historically worked something closer to 1650 hours per year and hunkered down for the winter).
Yah, sure, "well skilled", "best and brightest" like Faisal Shahzad, who attended SE U in Lakeland? He shouldn't even have gotten an F visa, and ditto with all but a few hundred of the rest of each year's applicants.
If you're going to claim you're "best" or "brightest" you'd better measure up to some reasonable standard.
Bang on. That's why smart companies like Google run interviews that test problem-solving skills rather than some particular api.
The set of smart companies certainly does not include Google.
2007-01-24
Rob Enderle _Dark Reading_/_TechWeb_/_CMP_
Executives and recruiters often behave stupidly "a recent interview with Google's CEO [Eric Schmidt], in which he discussed the company's [alleged] staffing problems and what it's doing to [make them worse]. Like many companies that experience very rapid growth, Google is having [self-created] problems getting enough [capable] people to do the jobs they [want] done. And, like many companies, Google has been using academic accomplishments as a key metric for weeding out [many very capable people from the flood of] applicants. Google's executive staff has [idiotically] concluded that interviewing takes too long and that by sorting potential employes based on grades -- largely an artificial metric in business -- they are probably missing out on many great employees they might otherwise hire. Unfortunately, Google's 'solution' to this problem is to hire people [who are capable of doing] jobs '3 levels higher' than the jobs they are hired for. This approach clearly addresses the need to fill the pipe-line for potential executives in a rapidly growing company; it could also result in a security nightmare. As anyone in security knows, the most likely employee to steal from a company is one who feels under-paid and under-appreciated."
2007-10-19
Michelle Kessler _USA Today_ pg B1
What's up at Google? "Google CEO Eric Schmidt said many hires were recent college graduates who received job offers earlier in the year [so, they're discriminating against older STEM workers]."
I haven't seen anything that I would really consider "cutting edge" technology for at least a decade. Whatever they are calling "cutting edge" can be quickly grasped by all but the most stupid engineers.
Personally, I think this complaint about a lack of people with the right skills is just an excuse used by mid-level managers and VP's to cover up the fact that they can't get things accomplished.
I have to agree with that. Most of the job ads I've been seeing are for temp gigs doing slog work, integrating data-bases, report writing... many of them using obsolete tools... not developing great new software products using the latest tools.
6% unemployment is not high at all. The "sweet spot" is about 5%. Any lower and it becomes too hard to find people.
Look at the figures in historical context. Look specifically at unemployment in STEM fields rather than the general average unemployment rates for all occupations, you would be very close. By looking at history and looking at the available information about historical government-defined unemployment rates for specific occupations, you will see that full-employment for actos is about 25%, while full-employment for STEM workers is closer to 2%.
The worst problem with the available data is that many move from being fully-employed software architects, biophysicists, mechanical engineers, to serving coffee, selling blue jeans, pet sitting, and the occasional gig teaching those "best and brightest" guest-workers how to program at the local juco. BLS counts them as fully-employed coffee servers and fully-employed retail sales staffers and such, subtracting them from the total available STEM labor force.
"This gradual rise in what is implicitly assumed to be full employment can be seen in the Economic Report of the President. In the Kennedy administration, 4% unemployment was set as an 'interim' unemployment target because they did not want to defend even ths level of unemployment. By the end of the Johnson administration, full employment was creeping up to 4.5%. By the end of the Ford administration, the economic report was defending 5% as full employment. In the 1979 economic report of president Carter, 6% is the implicit full-employment target." --- Lester C. Thurow 1980 _The Zero-Sum Society_ pg 73
I'm trying to hire a programmer out of college. No particular skill set - just a programmer with BS in CS. Have posted on facebook marketplace, craigslist, 10 very large universities, a few other places... It's been a month. We need someone bad. It sucks.
So, you're not willing to hire anyone over 20. That's age discrimination, and there goes over 90% of the CS talent pool.
"No particular skill set -- just a programmer". What hardware, OS, compilers, IDE, frameworks, libraries do you have? Do you have an Apple ii or an Atari 800 or a Sol, a Cray or a Cyber 930, or maybe a Cyber 6600 or maybe the ETA 10-Q? If you have "no particular" needs, it doesn't matter whether they're famliar with UNIX, or Linux, or Solaris, or Mac OS X, or Windoze, or AOS/VS or PLATO or NOS/VE or VMS or Irix or COS. It can be in Fortran ii or Algol or SNOBOL or Perl or APL or PHP or LISP or Awk or Python or Objective-C?
You've only posted on a few freebie backwaters. You haven't placed any newspaper classified ads in major markets (let alone display ads). You haven't posted on job web sites.
I'm not sure what you mean by: "10 very large universities, a few other places." Did you set up a table in the university union for a few hours each day for the last month (while most people were away for the break between Summer and Fall terms)? Did you pin your business card or job ads on bulletin boards? Did you speak with CS profs? Did you place ads in publications that programmers, analysts and software engineers read? Were these 10 large universities in different towns or different states or different regions of the USA?
As others pointed out, how much have you budgeted for the total compensation package, for interviewing expenses for flying candidates in, for relocation, for training?
Even NSF admitted a few years back that degrees aren't needed to be productive in STEM fields. As I recall, some 44% of productive IT workers and 22% of productive engineers don't have degrees in those fields. I've known people who did cancer research and research on mitochondria while they were under-grads, and successful commercial software product developers who were still in high school.
Yes, I've interviewed candidates... scared a couple off when waxing enthusiastic about the interesting things they would have the opportunity to learn (I found out later they thought it would be a burden rather than fun, so it's just as well).
I do, and let me tell you, it sucks.
Well, sure. Interviewing is not usually remotely as interesting as doing the actual software development work, or even work in a science lab or economic research. I'd place it somewhere between flipping burgers and shoveling out the barn, but you occasionally get to meet some very interesting people.
We've had open reqs for months now that we haven't been able to fill
That's your fault. Have you reconsidered your "requirements"? What is it you actually want to accomplish?
and that's not due to lack of trying.
So, what, exactly, did you try? How many newspaper ads around the country, and trade/professional pub ads and job site ads did you place? How many universities did you visit and set up a table in the university union on how many days? How many networking events for the unemployed did you visit? How many old professors did you ask for recommendations on recent grads or experienced professionals of their acquaintance? On how many bulletin boards did they post your job ads? How much effort have you invested in seeking old pros who are unemployed or under-employed? Have you visited other sites which have discussions of the dysfunctional job markets? (There are at least 5 Yahoo! groups, alone, lots of usenet news groups dedicated to related topics and many more with overlaps, much discussion on related topics associated with relevant articles from IDG/Computerworld, eWeek, UBM... via which you could easily find good people.)
How many US citizen candidates did you fly in? Did you pre-pay their hotel and rental car or pick them up and drive them, yourself? Did you show them the great products your firm is developing? Did you show them the great tools you have for them to work with? (If they weren't impressed, maybe you should hire them for ideas on how to improve.) Did you show them around town? Oh, you don't have money for all that, you say? Well, then, you don't have money to hire, so you'd better stop wasting your time and get back to work your own self.
I recently read a comment from a (now) friend who was my manager years ago; "If I need a Sr. Engineer, I advertise for an Architect. If I need an engineer, I advertise for a senior".
Eric Schmidt was caught out running a similar scam several years ago, setting phony "requirements" 3 grades above what was actually needed to do the job for which they were hiring. The scam was (is?) to hire people at junior salaries and require senior skills, knowledge and experience.
I recall a remark from a couple VPs. They said that you should restrict your requirements to the bare bones of what you just have to have, list a few "nice to haves", look for the brightest people you can get, and be prepared to stumble onto and take advantage of valuable combinations of abilities and experience you hadn't thought of. Sometimes, it helps to think of why you think you have to have something, the reason behind the reason, and then reconsider what your actual requirements are from that POV, because people have a tendency to get stuck in the middle in mental boxes that interfere with and misdirect us away from making progress toward the genuine goals. Don't dawdle. Work with what's available.
What this tells me is that you'd rather waste months and whine all the while, than invest in flying in good candidates, relocating the best, and a few weeks of good training in some specifics needed for the job... let alone making interviewing and employment a mutually beneficial arrangement. Other execs and managers have said it a different way; they don't want to invest in their people and nurture mutual loyalty; they'd rather bodyshop, under-compensate and have dishonest people who claim they can "hit the ground running", even if it costs more in the long run to repair their messes... and still whine.
Have you ever noticed that they also say how hard it is to recruit, but refuse to say exactly what measures they have taken to recruit?
They won't say in how many major newspapers across the country they run display ads for months at a time (daily and week-ends).
They won't say in how may trade/professional publications they run ads.
They won't say on how many job ad sites they place a particular ad.
They refuse to consider the importance of professional ethics considerations (is this project really legal and ethical?).
They refuse to say approximately how many and what percentages of hires and retained employees are over 35 year old US citizens.
They won't say how many times a year they send how many people to how many of the USA's thousands of university campuses which have STEM degree programs. (One major IT firm cancelled all of its campus visits to the California "state" university system campuses a couple years ago, while their execs were testifying to congress how difficult it was to recruit.)
They adamantly refuse to include contact names, e-mail addresses and voice telephone numbers actually answered by that human being (or those human beings) in their job ads. (Raytheon, GD, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, SAIC, BAE, BEA, GE, etc., certainly do not include them, and yet they disingenuously wail about "talent shortage" and their great effort to recruit.)
They won't say how many US ctizens they flew in from around the USA for interviews.
Unlike earlier times (when there was less shortage whining), they no longer fly many US applicants in for interviews, or cover relocation costs and help with the arrangements for US new-hires to move, or offer 2-12 weeks of new-hire training. (Some corporate bidness management programs used to have a strict 5-year or even 8-year curriculum and mentoring for new-hires, but the most extensive I ever saw for programmers, analysts and software engineers was 3 months for college new-hires.)
I have to wonder how many gifted, knowledgeable, creative, industrious STEM workers have gone into resume parser/data-base limbo forever, their preparation and experience totally wasted.
I also have to wonder how many of these executives and HR clones have attended seminars like Cohen and Grigsby's 7th annual employment and immigration law seminars in which they were coached in how to place ads where few US applicants in the field are likely to see and respond to them, and how to find pretexts on which to reject all US applicants. And they spoke of having to actually interview US applicants as a terrrrible burden, thrust on them by a perverse system which made it necessary to come up with such pretexts instead of just boldly refusing to consider any US applicants. C&G isn't some podunk outfit; it's a major firm with a lot of clients, and had just won a couple awards before they announced to the world their corruption by posting their videos of the seminar sessions. Fragomen et al. were doing much the same (contact us if you need help coming up with pretexts), and the immigration lawyers association announced that they believed such a corrupt attitude was totally appropriate.
And, of course, they won't say exactly why each candidate was rejected; obfuscation is the rule.
And this at the same time the "requirements" are getting more and more ridiculous, both in numbers and specificity, and hyper-credentialism is totally out of hand.
And I must not leave out the case of Sona Shah, who demostrated to congressmen and staffers how the game is played. She brought up some job ad sites, had them pick a couple ads, and called, putting the conversation on the speakers. The recruiter was very eager about her apparent intelligence, education, experience and match to their requirements... right up to the moment she told him she is a US citizen. Conversation over. He wanted cross-border bodies only.
With Google getting between 40K and 90K applications per month over the last 4 years, GE get
Once a good software architect, always a good software architect.
I exchanged a few e-mail messages with a main-stream media writer on this subject a couple months back. She seemed to think that everything we'd learned -- all of it -- has to be cast aside, and new material learned every 2-3 years. That's a huge exaggeration for any field, even medicine where the new research results seem to contradict the old every few months. The principles and foundation hold true decade after decade after decade.
I don't know of a single programmer/ analyst/ software engineer I've worked with who did not engage in continuous learning. And besides, the guys like Capers Jones, Watts S. Humphrey, Gerald M. Weinberg who measure such things, have concurred with the overwhelming anecdotal evidence that it takes only about 2 weeks to pick up a new programming language and IDE, and between a week and 18 months to deal with a major paradigm shift in design philosophy with new terminology and new meanings for old terms and such (employer investment in training with some substance to it can shorten the time considerably).
I've been doing a survey of algorithms texts, examining editions from the 1970s to present. There have only been a few marginal changes in the content over that time, and a very few significant new algorithms.
Most of the "new" programming languages I've seen in the last 12 years are merely variants of C, requiring little change in approach. Once you've learned one of them, you essentially know them all, and it's just a matter of moments, once you're aware of the kinds of variants which exist, to adapt without having to memorize the details and keep a mental table of all the languages and specific syntax and features.
It's all about cheap, easily brow-beaten labor.
Ed Yourdon was one of the first to note the destruction from cross-border bodyshopping and off-shoring, even if he misinterpreted it a bit.
Getting a clearance is no problem... if the employer will cover the costs, and pay and train you while waiting to find out whether you will be cleared. Those costs can add up. And it's not cheap sending people out to talk with most of the people you've ever known, checking up on places you've lived, gone to college/school, teachers you worked with, tracking down former co-workers and employers, and relatives for that matter, searching your web postings...
I think they should do the same with every applicant for a visa. It would avoid many of the Shahzad-like fiascos, and charge the applicant and sponsor for the costs. But, of course, neither the Reps nor Dems really want to do something that would be effective like that when their goal is an excess of cheap labor.
Yes, I must confess that when I had security clearances, I made it a point to avoid information I did not actually *need* to know to do my job.
But a cyber security worker needs to do the opposite to some extent, to poke into things while under supervision in order to find weaknesses, to find where others have exploited those weaknesses. Still, we've got plenty of bright people who could be trained in the specifics of this skill-set and turned loose to get the job done.
I'll be convinced there's a genuine "shortage" of people able to do a good job when the job ads shift from hyper-specificity and hyper-credentialism, to big-G intelligence and a solid foundation of knowledge in the field, with offers of specific training... and the job ads include e-mail addresses, voice phone numbers, and street addresses by which you can get in touch with actual human beings, instead of having your info dumped through some resume parser into a black-hole data-base.
Until then, it appears to be the usual cheap labor scam NSF, STEM execs (in business and academe), and immigration lawyers have been pulling since the 1980s, and including the NSF and DoD crises-mongering when there is no actual crisis that's been around since just after WW2.
"Employed persons worked an average of 7.5 hours on the days they worked. More hours were worked, on average, on week-days than on week-end days -- 7.9 hours compared with 5.0 hours. On the days that they worked, employed men worked 56 minutes more than employed women. This difference partly reflects women's greater likelihood of working part time. However, even among full-time workers (those usually working 35 hours or more per week), men worked longer than women -- 8.3 hours compared with 7.5 hours.
Many more people worked on week-days than on week-end days; that is, they spent some time doing tasks required for a job, regardless of whether it was part of their usual work schedule or arrangement. 83% of employed persons worked on an average week day, compared with 35% on an average week-end day. On the days that they worked, 24% of employed persons did some or all of their work at home, and 84% did some or all of their work at their work-place. Men and women were about equally likely to do some or all of their work at home.
[People with more than one job] were almost twice as likely to work on an average week-end day as were [those with one job] -- 59% compared with 32%. [People with more than one job] also were more likely to work at home than were [those with one job] -- 32% compared with 22%.
Self-employed workers were 3 times more likely than wage and salary workers to have done some work at home on days worked -- 60% compared with 20%. On the days that they worked, 40% of employed people age 25 and over with a bachelor's degree or higher did some work at home, compared with only 10% of those with less than a high school diploma...
On an average day, nearly everyone age 15 and over (96%) engaged in some sort of leisure activity, such as watching TV, socializing, or exercising. Of those who engaged in leisure activities, men spent more time in these activities (5.8 hours) than did women (5.1 hours)...
Students averaged 5.08 hours per day in class, and 2.66 hours on week-days and 3.36 hours on holidays and week-ends on home-work and research."
Time Use Survey
There are more experienced techies who understand new technology than there are young ones who understand old technology. Or how their new technology works behind the scenes, for that matter.
And no, people aren't old at 40-50. With a normal work life lasting from 20-25 to 60-70, that's only halfway through, and is more likely to be near the peak of performance.
Actually, you could read that a different way. Many workers over 35 are no longer given access to the latest projects, docs, tools, etc. It's not that they don't understand new technology; it's that they aren't welcome.
The 50s were also the traditional peak earning years -- before bodyshopping.
I'd put the productive work-life from 25 to 75, based on some of the people with whom I've worked. Before 25, you're just an intern/apprentice, learning how to learn the ropes.
"The life of the peasant of the Middle Ages was short & nasty. The average life expectancy was 40 years." --- William B. Williams 1995 _Future Perfect_ pp 125-126
"Life expectancy in the 1690s was 32 years. For the poor, life was even shorter." --- Michael Rothschild 1992 _Bionomics_ pg 19
"The dire poverty of the early 19th century Irish may be indicated by their average life expectancy of 19 years -- compard to 36 years for contemporary American slaves..." --- Thomas Sowell 1998 _Conquests and Cultures_ pg65 (citing Oliver MacDonagh 1976 "The Irish Famine Emigration to the United States" _Perspectives in American History_ vol10 pg366; Eugene D. Genovese 1974 _Roll, Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made_ pp524-525; Robert W. Fogel & Stanley L. Engerman 1974 _Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery_ pg125; Carl Wittke 1967 _We Who Built America_ pg129)
In 1895, life expectancy at birth was 42, per Buckminster Fuller (quoted in Michael Toms & Justine Willis Toms 1998 _True Work_ pg 182)
"In 1930, average life expectancy at birth was 58 years for men, 61 years for women (& at age 65 life expectancy was an additional 12 years for men & 13 for women); by 1990, life expectancy was 71 years for men, 79 for women (& at age 65, an additional 15 years for men & 19 for women)." --- Robert J. Samuelson 1995 _The Good Life & Its Discontents_ pg 222 (referencing _1994 Green Book: OverView of Entitlement Programs_ table A.2)
"In 1940 people aged 65 & older in the US was only 6.8% of the total population, according to that year's census. Life expectancy at birth was calculated by the National Center for Health Statistics to be 63.6 years -- 61.4 years for men & 65.7 years for women... The hardy few who did make it to 65 could expect to live -- & draw benefits -- another dozen years (13.4 for women)." --- Marshall N. Carter & William G. Shipman 1996 _Promises to Keep_ pp 29-30
"In 1994 [the Socialist Insecurity abomination] calculated life expectancy at birth to be 72.6 years for men & 79.0 years for women. It projects life expectancy to rise by about 5 years over the next 75 years -- or by 8 months each decade. By the year 2065 the child born in 1996 should be a few years into retirement -- if there is still retirement..." --- Marshall N. Carter & William G. Shipman 1996 _Promises to Keep_ pg 26 (referencing socialist inecurity abmomination trustees 1995 annual report)
"Really, what is this IT sector. Does it include EA? Id? IBM? The guy who fixes the printer? The help desk retard who tells you to reboot?..."
Yes, "IT" is a wide-open general term. It includes the old "data processors" and "computer operators", and software architects, and CIS managers, and sys admins and network admins and data-base admins, and programmers, and analysts, and computer scientists, SQA testers, and software engineers. It includes working on software for accounting, for design of parts for nuclear weapons systems and of sky-scrapers, wholesale electricity transmission transaction processing, embedded systems in your toaster and microwave and cellular phone, games, software to do animations and movie editing, econometrics, linguistics, psychology, neuro-physiology... General!
But most of the people who use it seem to be talking, most of the time, about the house "geeks" or "techies", kept caged in a non software or computer firm to hold the hands, spoon-feed, and do the dirty work for the clueless B-school bozos, or the bodies shopped to go out to firms to customize the interface and configuration of pre-packaged software like Oracle.
Actual software product developers (lumped with all of the other production workers in their firms) are a small minority according to BLS. Let's see...
http://www.kermitrose.com/jgoEconData.html
employment by industry... Here, we go, "software publishing" versus bodies shopped:
http://www.kermitrose.com/images/blsSIC2.jpg
They changed the series names and codes on me, but you can see the difference back at the peak.
Ugh. You just reminded me. New metropolitan area unemployment rates are supposed to be out, today. Gotta go.
Yah, body shopping has ramped up since the beginning of 1983, with what seems to be an ever steepening curve. Meanwhile, employment of production workers in software product firms has been flat since 2000 (well, not flat, really, it's making a sort of scalloped curve since then, down and then up about to where it was, and then diving down again), while the available talent pool has continued to expand.
So, why weren't you sending your older programmers back to college, or to special intensive courses, to pick up those latest algorithms and programming languages and paradigms?
It sounds an awful lot like a flimsy excuse, especially when we've been seeing that programmers over 35 who go back to college to pick up the latest buzz-words still aren't hired.
To quote an issue of Norm Matloff's news-letter: "'Taking a course is just not going to work for a senior person, given his salary.', said Maryann Rousseau, an employment agent."
And an article by Margie Wylie: "The industry [executives have] made it clear. [They are] not interested in re-training the current work-force, which is likely adequate for its needs. No, it wants fresh bodies, preferably young or beholden ones willing to accept entry-level wages for long hours and who are either burdened with few family obligations or willing to pass them over... for the most part, companies are unwilling to re-train experienced programmers to fill available slots..."
And this from the Chicago Tribune: "'IOW', Training observes, 'only about 2 in 10 companies routinely put their money where their mouths are when it comes to retaining [allegedly] valued people.'"
If you can't find more capable programmers of any age than you can shake a stick at, either you're not trying, or you're doing something else wrong.
And, BTW, being a body shoppiner is doing something wrong.
"Any developer can tell you that not all C or PHP or Java programmers are created equal; some are vastly more productive or creative."
There's been some research: "The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order of magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability." --- Randall E. Stross (quoted by Robert K. Weatherall "A Booming Market for New Graduates" _Engineers_ vol3 #2 1997 April pg 11; quoted in Richard Ellis & B. Lindsay Lowell 1999 January "Core Occupations of the US Information Technolgy Work-Force")
"The computer field has [in the past] honored competence, content and creativity more than credentials." --- Clifford Adelman _Leading, Concurrent, or Lagging: The Knowledge Content of Computer Science in Higher Education and the Labor market_ 1997 pg 40 (quoted in Richard Ellis & B. Lindsay Lowell 1999 January "Core Occupations of the US Information Technolgy Work-Force")
"One top-notch engineer is worth '300 times or more than the average', explains Alan Eustace, a Google vice president of engineering."
"The best programmers on the team may be so much better than the rest that just a few of [them] can put out more than all the rest combined." --- Alistair Cockburn 2002 _Agile Software Development_ pg 61
But, such researchers have noted, it's the few people who know 10 or more programming languages who outshine the rest. Another odd correlation with high productivity is having a background in music, not math or physics. Scientists who can do a little programming are usually terrible at it; their software is almost impossible to maintain. But then how many 20 year olds know a dozen programming languages? And how many of the silver-backs have learned several additional programming languages in the last decade?
Slashdot Mirror
And, on average, work a few more hours per week (and year), though Americans work more than Europeans, and the statistical spread is bound to have over-laps. Jared Diamond suggested that it is a cultural thing resulting from traditional labor-intensive (3000 hours per year) wet-field rice cultivation (while Europeans historically worked something closer to 1650 hours per year and hunkered down for the winter).
Right. Each is defective in its own ways.
Eudora was better. Nisus Mail was better. (NewsWatcher and Thoth were better than these web-based discussions... less Balkanized.)
But, of course, that's not what the cross-body bodyshoppers, and off-shorers, and cravers of cheap pliant young labor here really want.
"Hotmail founder was India born..."
You should try for a positive example, not negative.
Yah, sure, "well skilled", "best and brightest" like Faisal Shahzad, who attended SE U in Lakeland? He shouldn't even have gotten an F visa, and ditto with all but a few hundred of the rest of each year's applicants. If you're going to claim you're "best" or "brightest" you'd better measure up to some reasonable standard.
So, why are you using a bodyshop at all? Why didn't you just hire some people?
Bang on. That's why smart companies like Google run interviews that test problem-solving skills rather than some particular api.
The set of smart companies certainly does not include Google.
2007-01-24
Rob Enderle _Dark Reading_/_TechWeb_/_CMP_
Executives and recruiters often behave stupidly
"a recent interview with Google's CEO [Eric Schmidt], in which he discussed the company's [alleged] staffing problems and what it's doing to [make them worse]. Like many companies that experience very rapid growth, Google is having [self-created] problems getting enough [capable] people to do the jobs they [want] done. And, like many companies, Google has been using academic accomplishments as a key metric for weeding out [many very capable people from the flood of] applicants. Google's executive staff has [idiotically] concluded that interviewing takes too long and that by sorting potential employes based on grades -- largely an artificial metric in business -- they are probably missing out on many great employees they might otherwise hire. Unfortunately, Google's 'solution' to this problem is to hire people [who are capable of doing] jobs '3 levels higher' than the jobs they are hired for. This approach clearly addresses the need to fill the pipe-line for potential executives in a rapidly growing company; it could also result in a security nightmare. As anyone in security knows, the most likely employee to steal from a company is one who feels under-paid and under-appreciated."
2007-10-19
Michelle Kessler _USA Today_ pg B1
What's up at Google?
"Google CEO Eric Schmidt said many hires were recent college graduates who received job offers earlier in the year [so, they're discriminating against older STEM workers]."
I haven't seen anything that I would really consider "cutting edge" technology for at least a decade. Whatever they are calling "cutting edge" can be quickly grasped by all but the most stupid engineers.
Personally, I think this complaint about a lack of people with the right skills is just an excuse used by mid-level managers and VP's to cover up the fact that they can't get things accomplished.
I have to agree with that. Most of the job ads I've been seeing are for temp gigs doing slog work, integrating data-bases, report writing... many of them using obsolete tools... not developing great new software products using the latest tools.
6% unemployment is not high at all. The "sweet spot" is about 5%. Any lower and it becomes too hard to find people.
Look at the figures in historical context. Look specifically at unemployment in STEM fields rather than the general average unemployment rates for all occupations, you would be very close. By looking at history and looking at the available information about historical government-defined unemployment rates for specific occupations, you will see that full-employment for actos is about 25%, while full-employment for STEM workers is closer to 2%.
The worst problem with the available data is that many move from being fully-employed software architects, biophysicists, mechanical engineers, to serving coffee, selling blue jeans, pet sitting, and the occasional gig teaching those "best and brightest" guest-workers how to program at the local juco. BLS counts them as fully-employed coffee servers and fully-employed retail sales staffers and such, subtracting them from the total available STEM labor force.
"This gradual rise in what is implicitly assumed to be full employment can be seen in the Economic Report of the President. In the Kennedy administration, 4% unemployment was set as an 'interim' unemployment target because they did not want to defend even ths level of unemployment. By the end of the Johnson administration, full employment was creeping up to 4.5%. By the end of the Ford administration, the economic report was defending 5% as full employment. In the 1979 economic report of president Carter, 6% is the implicit full-employment target." --- Lester C. Thurow 1980 _The Zero-Sum Society_ pg 73
Graphs of employment/unemployment by industry
by occupation
test scores and degrees earned (and quotes)
job ads, job ad indices, price indices, etc.
Yah, after all, it's only a few hundred thousand US citizen STEM workers having difficulty landing decent work. http://www.kermitrose.com/econ10PersonalToll.html http://www.kermitrose.com/jgoEconData.html
I'm trying to hire a programmer out of college. No particular skill set - just a programmer with BS in CS. Have posted on facebook marketplace, craigslist, 10 very large universities, a few other places... It's been a month. We need someone bad. It sucks.
So, you're not willing to hire anyone over 20. That's age discrimination, and there goes over 90% of the CS talent pool.
"No particular skill set -- just a programmer". What hardware, OS, compilers, IDE, frameworks, libraries do you have? Do you have an Apple ii or an Atari 800 or a Sol, a Cray or a Cyber 930, or maybe a Cyber 6600 or maybe the ETA 10-Q? If you have "no particular" needs, it doesn't matter whether they're famliar with UNIX, or Linux, or Solaris, or Mac OS X, or Windoze, or AOS/VS or PLATO or NOS/VE or VMS or Irix or COS. It can be in Fortran ii or Algol or SNOBOL or Perl or APL or PHP or LISP or Awk or Python or Objective-C?
You've only posted on a few freebie backwaters. You haven't placed any newspaper classified ads in major markets (let alone display ads). You haven't posted on job web sites.
I'm not sure what you mean by: "10 very large universities, a few other places." Did you set up a table in the university union for a few hours each day for the last month (while most people were away for the break between Summer and Fall terms)? Did you pin your business card or job ads on bulletin boards? Did you speak with CS profs? Did you place ads in publications that programmers, analysts and software engineers read? Were these 10 large universities in different towns or different states or different regions of the USA?
As others pointed out, how much have you budgeted for the total compensation package, for interviewing expenses for flying candidates in, for relocation, for training?
Is this a real job or a yet another temp gig?
Slow to hire? I know a number of companies that still can't find people.
Once again, you fail to entertain us with the impressive story (or impress us with the entertaining story) of your herculean efforts and goals.
Even NSF admitted a few years back that degrees aren't needed to be productive in STEM fields. As I recall, some 44% of productive IT workers and 22% of productive engineers don't have degrees in those fields. I've known people who did cancer research and research on mitochondria while they were under-grads, and successful commercial software product developers who were still in high school.
Yes, I've interviewed candidates... scared a couple off when waxing enthusiastic about the interesting things they would have the opportunity to learn (I found out later they thought it would be a burden rather than fun, so it's just as well).
I do, and let me tell you, it sucks.
Well, sure. Interviewing is not usually remotely as interesting as doing the actual software development work, or even work in a science lab or economic research. I'd place it somewhere between flipping burgers and shoveling out the barn, but you occasionally get to meet some very interesting people.
We've had open reqs for months now that we haven't been able to fill
That's your fault. Have you reconsidered your "requirements"? What is it you actually want to accomplish?
and that's not due to lack of trying.
So, what, exactly, did you try? How many newspaper ads around the country, and trade/professional pub ads and job site ads did you place? How many universities did you visit and set up a table in the university union on how many days? How many networking events for the unemployed did you visit? How many old professors did you ask for recommendations on recent grads or experienced professionals of their acquaintance? On how many bulletin boards did they post your job ads? How much effort have you invested in seeking old pros who are unemployed or under-employed? Have you visited other sites which have discussions of the dysfunctional job markets? (There are at least 5 Yahoo! groups, alone, lots of usenet news groups dedicated to related topics and many more with overlaps, much discussion on related topics associated with relevant articles from IDG/Computerworld, eWeek, UBM... via which you could easily find good people.)
How many US citizen candidates did you fly in? Did you pre-pay their hotel and rental car or pick them up and drive them, yourself? Did you show them the great products your firm is developing? Did you show them the great tools you have for them to work with? (If they weren't impressed, maybe you should hire them for ideas on how to improve.) Did you show them around town? Oh, you don't have money for all that, you say? Well, then, you don't have money to hire, so you'd better stop wasting your time and get back to work your own self.
I recently read a comment from a (now) friend who was my manager years ago; "If I need a Sr. Engineer, I advertise for an Architect. If I need an engineer, I advertise for a senior".
Eric Schmidt was caught out running a similar scam several years ago, setting phony "requirements" 3 grades above what was actually needed to do the job for which they were hiring. The scam was (is?) to hire people at junior salaries and require senior skills, knowledge and experience.
I recall a remark from a couple VPs. They said that you should restrict your requirements to the bare bones of what you just have to have, list a few "nice to haves", look for the brightest people you can get, and be prepared to stumble onto and take advantage of valuable combinations of abilities and experience you hadn't thought of. Sometimes, it helps to think of why you think you have to have something, the reason behind the reason, and then reconsider what your actual requirements are from that POV, because people have a tendency to get stuck in the middle in mental boxes that interfere with and misdirect us away from making progress toward the genuine goals. Don't dawdle. Work with what's available.
What this tells me is that you'd rather waste months and whine all the while, than invest in flying in good candidates, relocating the best, and a few weeks of good training in some specifics needed for the job... let alone making interviewing and employment a mutually beneficial arrangement. Other execs and managers have said it a different way; they don't want to invest in their people and nurture mutual loyalty; they'd rather bodyshop, under-compensate and have dishonest people who claim they can "hit the ground running", even if it costs more in the long run to repair their messes... and still whine.
They won't say in how many major newspapers across the country they run display ads for months at a time (daily and week-ends).
They won't say in how may trade/professional publications they run ads.
They won't say on how many job ad sites they place a particular ad.
They refuse to consider the importance of professional ethics considerations (is this project really legal and ethical?).
They refuse to say approximately how many and what percentages of hires and retained employees are over 35 year old US citizens.
They won't say how many times a year they send how many people to how many of the USA's thousands of university campuses which have STEM degree programs. (One major IT firm cancelled all of its campus visits to the California "state" university system campuses a couple years ago, while their execs were testifying to congress how difficult it was to recruit.)
They adamantly refuse to include contact names, e-mail addresses and voice telephone numbers actually answered by that human being (or those human beings) in their job ads. (Raytheon, GD, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, SAIC, BAE, BEA, GE, etc., certainly do not include them, and yet they disingenuously wail about "talent shortage" and their great effort to recruit.)
They won't say how many US ctizens they flew in from around the USA for interviews.
Unlike earlier times (when there was less shortage whining), they no longer fly many US applicants in for interviews, or cover relocation costs and help with the arrangements for US new-hires to move, or offer 2-12 weeks of new-hire training. (Some corporate bidness management programs used to have a strict 5-year or even 8-year curriculum and mentoring for new-hires, but the most extensive I ever saw for programmers, analysts and software engineers was 3 months for college new-hires.)
I have to wonder how many gifted, knowledgeable, creative, industrious STEM workers have gone into resume parser/data-base limbo forever, their preparation and experience totally wasted.
I also have to wonder how many of these executives and HR clones have attended seminars like Cohen and Grigsby's 7th annual employment and immigration law seminars in which they were coached in how to place ads where few US applicants in the field are likely to see and respond to them, and how to find pretexts on which to reject all US applicants. And they spoke of having to actually interview US applicants as a terrrrible burden, thrust on them by a perverse system which made it necessary to come up with such pretexts instead of just boldly refusing to consider any US applicants. C&G isn't some podunk outfit; it's a major firm with a lot of clients, and had just won a couple awards before they announced to the world their corruption by posting their videos of the seminar sessions. Fragomen et al. were doing much the same (contact us if you need help coming up with pretexts), and the immigration lawyers association announced that they believed such a corrupt attitude was totally appropriate.
And, of course, they won't say exactly why each candidate was rejected; obfuscation is the rule.
And this at the same time the "requirements" are getting more and more ridiculous, both in numbers and specificity, and hyper-credentialism is totally out of hand.
And I must not leave out the case of Sona Shah, who demostrated to congressmen and staffers how the game is played. She brought up some job ad sites, had them pick a couple ads, and called, putting the conversation on the speakers. The recruiter was very eager about her apparent intelligence, education, experience and match to their requirements... right up to the moment she told him she is a US citizen. Conversation over. He wanted cross-border bodies only.
With Google getting between 40K and 90K applications per month over the last 4 years, GE get
Once a good software architect, always a good software architect.
I exchanged a few e-mail messages with a main-stream media writer on this subject a couple months back. She seemed to think that everything we'd learned -- all of it -- has to be cast aside, and new material learned every 2-3 years. That's a huge exaggeration for any field, even medicine where the new research results seem to contradict the old every few months. The principles and foundation hold true decade after decade after decade.
I don't know of a single programmer/ analyst/ software engineer I've worked with who did not engage in continuous learning. And besides, the guys like Capers Jones, Watts S. Humphrey, Gerald M. Weinberg who measure such things, have concurred with the overwhelming anecdotal evidence that it takes only about 2 weeks to pick up a new programming language and IDE, and between a week and 18 months to deal with a major paradigm shift in design philosophy with new terminology and new meanings for old terms and such (employer investment in training with some substance to it can shorten the time considerably).
I've been doing a survey of algorithms texts, examining editions from the 1970s to present. There have only been a few marginal changes in the content over that time, and a very few significant new algorithms.
Most of the "new" programming languages I've seen in the last 12 years are merely variants of C, requiring little change in approach. Once you've learned one of them, you essentially know them all, and it's just a matter of moments, once you're aware of the kinds of variants which exist, to adapt without having to memorize the details and keep a mental table of all the languages and specific syntax and features.
It's all about cheap, easily brow-beaten labor.
Ed Yourdon was one of the first to note the destruction from cross-border bodyshopping and off-shoring, even if he misinterpreted it a bit.
Getting a clearance is no problem... if the employer will cover the costs, and pay and train you while waiting to find out whether you will be cleared. Those costs can add up. And it's not cheap sending people out to talk with most of the people you've ever known, checking up on places you've lived, gone to college/school, teachers you worked with, tracking down former co-workers and employers, and relatives for that matter, searching your web postings...
I think they should do the same with every applicant for a visa. It would avoid many of the Shahzad-like fiascos, and charge the applicant and sponsor for the costs. But, of course, neither the Reps nor Dems really want to do something that would be effective like that when their goal is an excess of cheap labor.
Yes, I must confess that when I had security clearances, I made it a point to avoid information I did not actually *need* to know to do my job.
But a cyber security worker needs to do the opposite to some extent, to poke into things while under supervision in order to find weaknesses, to find where others have exploited those weaknesses. Still, we've got plenty of bright people who could be trained in the specifics of this skill-set and turned loose to get the job done.
I'll be convinced there's a genuine "shortage" of people able to do a good job when the job ads shift from hyper-specificity and hyper-credentialism, to big-G intelligence and a solid foundation of knowledge in the field, with offers of specific training... and the job ads include e-mail addresses, voice phone numbers, and street addresses by which you can get in touch with actual human beings, instead of having your info dumped through some resume parser into a black-hole data-base.
Until then, it appears to be the usual cheap labor scam NSF, STEM execs (in business and academe), and immigration lawyers have been pulling since the 1980s, and including the NSF and DoD crises-mongering when there is no actual crisis that's been around since just after WW2.
"Employed persons worked an average of 7.5 hours on the days they worked. More hours were worked, on average, on week-days than on week-end days -- 7.9 hours compared with 5.0 hours. On the days that they worked, employed men worked 56 minutes more than employed women. This difference partly reflects women's greater likelihood of working part time. However, even among full-time workers (those usually working 35 hours or more per week), men worked longer than women -- 8.3 hours compared with 7.5 hours.
Many more people worked on week-days than on week-end days; that is, they spent some time doing tasks required for a job, regardless of whether it was part of their usual work schedule or arrangement. 83% of employed persons worked on an average week day, compared with 35% on an average week-end day. On the days that they worked, 24% of employed persons did some or all of their work at home, and 84% did some or all of their work at their work-place. Men and women were about equally likely to do some or all of their work at home.
[People with more than one job] were almost twice as likely to work on an average week-end day as were [those with one job] -- 59% compared with 32%. [People with more than one job] also were more likely to work at home than were [those with one job] -- 32% compared with 22%.
Self-employed workers were 3 times more likely than wage and salary workers to have done some work at home on days worked -- 60% compared with 20%. On the days that they worked, 40% of employed people age 25 and over with a bachelor's degree or higher did some work at home, compared with only 10% of those with less than a high school diploma...
On an average day, nearly everyone age 15 and over (96%) engaged in some sort of leisure activity, such as watching TV, socializing, or exercising. Of those who engaged in leisure activities, men spent more time in these activities (5.8 hours) than did women (5.1 hours)...
Students averaged 5.08 hours per day in class, and 2.66 hours on week-days and 3.36 hours on holidays and week-ends on home-work and research."
Time Use Survey
There are more experienced techies who understand new technology than there are young ones who understand old technology. Or how their new technology works behind the scenes, for that matter.
And no, people aren't old at 40-50. With a normal work life lasting from 20-25 to 60-70, that's only halfway through, and is more likely to be near the peak of performance.
Actually, you could read that a different way. Many workers over 35 are no longer given access to the latest projects, docs, tools, etc. It's not that they don't understand new technology; it's that they aren't welcome.
The 50s were also the traditional peak earning years -- before bodyshopping.
I'd put the productive work-life from 25 to 75, based on some of the people with whom I've worked. Before 25, you're just an intern/apprentice, learning how to learn the ropes.
"The life of the peasant of the Middle Ages was short & nasty. The average life expectancy was 40 years." --- William B. Williams 1995 _Future Perfect_ pp 125-126
"Life expectancy in the 1690s was 32 years. For the poor, life was even shorter." --- Michael Rothschild 1992 _Bionomics_ pg 19
"The dire poverty of the early 19th century Irish may be indicated by their average life expectancy of 19 years -- compard to 36 years for contemporary American slaves..." --- Thomas Sowell 1998 _Conquests and Cultures_ pg65 (citing Oliver MacDonagh 1976 "The Irish Famine Emigration to the United States" _Perspectives in American History_ vol10 pg366; Eugene D. Genovese 1974 _Roll, Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made_ pp524-525; Robert W. Fogel & Stanley L. Engerman 1974 _Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery_ pg125; Carl Wittke 1967 _We Who Built America_ pg129)
In 1895, life expectancy at birth was 42, per Buckminster Fuller (quoted in Michael Toms & Justine Willis Toms 1998 _True Work_ pg 182)
"In 1930, average life expectancy at birth was 58 years for men, 61 years for women (& at age 65 life expectancy was an additional 12 years for men & 13 for women); by 1990, life expectancy was 71 years for men, 79 for women (& at age 65, an additional 15 years for men & 19 for women)." --- Robert J. Samuelson 1995 _The Good Life & Its Discontents_ pg 222 (referencing _1994 Green Book: OverView of Entitlement Programs_ table A.2)
"In 1940 people aged 65 & older in the US was only 6.8% of the total population, according to that year's census. Life expectancy at birth was calculated by the National Center for Health Statistics to be 63.6 years -- 61.4 years for men & 65.7 years for women... The hardy few who did make it to 65 could expect to live -- & draw benefits -- another dozen years (13.4 for women)." --- Marshall N. Carter & William G. Shipman 1996 _Promises to Keep_ pp 29-30
"In 1994 [the Socialist Insecurity abomination] calculated life expectancy at birth to be 72.6 years for men & 79.0 years for women. It projects life expectancy to rise by about 5 years over the next 75 years -- or by 8 months each decade. By the year 2065 the child born in 1996 should be a few years into retirement -- if there is still retirement..." --- Marshall N. Carter & William G. Shipman 1996 _Promises to Keep_ pg 26 (referencing socialist inecurity abmomination trustees 1995 annual report)
1997-07-29
Sanjoy Banerjee _Pacific News_
From a Life Expectancy of 28 to 60 -- Measuring India's Advances Over 50 Years of Independence
graph
Related link: "In India life expectancy has gone up from 20 years in the beginning of the 20th century to 62 years today." --- HelpAge India
The Indian Aging Scenario
2000
_India Child_
"Really, what is this IT sector. Does it include EA? Id? IBM? The guy who fixes the printer? The help desk retard who tells you to reboot?..." Yes, "IT" is a wide-open general term. It includes the old "data processors" and "computer operators", and software architects, and CIS managers, and sys admins and network admins and data-base admins, and programmers, and analysts, and computer scientists, SQA testers, and software engineers. It includes working on software for accounting, for design of parts for nuclear weapons systems and of sky-scrapers, wholesale electricity transmission transaction processing, embedded systems in your toaster and microwave and cellular phone, games, software to do animations and movie editing, econometrics, linguistics, psychology, neuro-physiology... General! But most of the people who use it seem to be talking, most of the time, about the house "geeks" or "techies", kept caged in a non software or computer firm to hold the hands, spoon-feed, and do the dirty work for the clueless B-school bozos, or the bodies shopped to go out to firms to customize the interface and configuration of pre-packaged software like Oracle. Actual software product developers (lumped with all of the other production workers in their firms) are a small minority according to BLS. Let's see... http://www.kermitrose.com/jgoEconData.html employment by industry... Here, we go, "software publishing" versus bodies shopped: http://www.kermitrose.com/images/blsSIC2.jpg They changed the series names and codes on me, but you can see the difference back at the peak. Ugh. You just reminded me. New metropolitan area unemployment rates are supposed to be out, today. Gotta go.
Yah, body shopping has ramped up since the beginning of 1983, with what seems to be an ever steepening curve. Meanwhile, employment of production workers in software product firms has been flat since 2000 (well, not flat, really, it's making a sort of scalloped curve since then, down and then up about to where it was, and then diving down again), while the available talent pool has continued to expand.
Yes, there's a lot of work process and tools implicit in that one line about open-source projects.
So, why weren't you sending your older programmers back to college, or to special intensive courses, to pick up those latest algorithms and programming languages and paradigms?
It sounds an awful lot like a flimsy excuse, especially when we've been seeing that programmers over 35 who go back to college to pick up the latest buzz-words still aren't hired.
To quote an issue of Norm Matloff's news-letter: "'Taking a course is just not going to work for a senior person, given his salary.', said Maryann Rousseau, an employment agent."
And an article by Margie Wylie: "The industry [executives have] made it clear. [They are] not interested in re-training the current work-force, which is likely adequate for its needs. No, it wants fresh bodies, preferably young or beholden ones willing to accept entry-level wages for long hours and who are either burdened with few family obligations or willing to pass them over... for the most part, companies are unwilling to re-train experienced programmers to fill available slots..."
And this from the Chicago Tribune: "'IOW', Training observes, 'only about 2 in 10 companies routinely put their money where their mouths are when it comes to retaining [allegedly] valued people.'"
If you can't find more capable programmers of any age than you can shake a stick at, either you're not trying, or you're doing something else wrong. And, BTW, being a body shoppiner is doing something wrong.
"Any developer can tell you that not all C or PHP or Java programmers are created equal; some are vastly more productive or creative."
There's been some research:
"The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order of magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability." --- Randall E. Stross (quoted by Robert K. Weatherall "A Booming Market for New Graduates" _Engineers_ vol3 #2 1997 April pg 11; quoted in Richard Ellis & B. Lindsay Lowell 1999 January "Core Occupations of the US Information Technolgy Work-Force")
"The computer field has [in the past] honored competence, content and creativity more than credentials." --- Clifford Adelman _Leading, Concurrent, or Lagging: The Knowledge Content of Computer Science in Higher Education and the Labor market_ 1997 pg 40 (quoted in Richard Ellis & B. Lindsay Lowell 1999 January "Core Occupations of the US Information Technolgy Work-Force")
"One top-notch engineer is worth '300 times or more than the average', explains Alan Eustace, a Google vice president of engineering."
"The best programmers on the team may be so much better than the rest that just a few of [them] can put out more than all the rest combined." --- Alistair Cockburn 2002 _Agile Software Development_ pg 61
But, such researchers have noted, it's the few people who know 10 or more programming languages who outshine the rest. Another odd correlation with high productivity is having a background in music, not math or physics. Scientists who can do a little programming are usually terrible at it; their software is almost impossible to maintain. But then how many 20 year olds know a dozen programming languages? And how many of the silver-backs have learned several additional programming languages in the last decade?