Tech Sector Slow To Hire 450
Iftekhar25 writes "The NY Times is running an article about soaring unemployment rates for IT in the US (6 percent) despite a tech sector that is thirsting for engineering talent. Quoting: 'The chief hurdles to more robust technology hiring appear to be increasing automation and the addition of highly skilled labor overseas. The result is a mismatch of skill levels here at home: not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms, and too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at lower cost. That's a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers, whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.'"
50% right (Score:5, Insightful)
not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms,
Complete bullshit.
and too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at lower cost
This is 100% true.
And don't forget this reason I am adding:
Too few people willing to work heroic hours for non-heroic pay.
grapes of wrath (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy to make qualifications that nobody can meet (Score:5, Insightful)
...then complain about a lack of "qualified" candidates.
A bunch of bullshit to justify offshoring (Score:5, Insightful)
The result is a mismatch of skill levels here at home: not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms, and too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at lower cost. That's a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers, whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.'"
Then train them or make it a legal requirement to hire & train them. It's one thing to complain about regular people having to settle with less, why can't a business be made to do the same?
Reads like an justification for offshoring if you'd ask me.
It's called "offshore outsourcing" not unemploymen (Score:2, Insightful)
All we have to do is get rid of the H1B bastards and BOOM instant high tech employment.
Let's get going - time for a "change"
Re:50% right (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, companies are "milking the recession". This usually happens at the tail end of a recession, when interest rates are low and inflation is also low, companies are making profits but they are not investing in labor supply. The main thing is maybe capacity isn't fully utilized, maybe they want to buy new equipment, maybe they want to reward the shareholders that stayed through the rough times. I see it at a lot of places, and people I know are seeing it as well. Companies with good balance sheets aren't replacing people as fast, they are milking more work hours out of salary people and they are utilizing temps and contractors as a way to avoid permanent expenses. A few more good quarters and things should start trending back down to the normal structural unemployment rate of around 5-7%. IT is a growth industry so it in turn should return to a normal growth structural unemployment of 3-5%. Having been present on more than a few interviews recently, there's not too many good people out there. If you're out there and you're good, you shouldn't have trouble getting a job. If you can't, you should consider washing your beard and not wearing that T-shirt that looks like the front of a tuxedo to interviews...
Re:50% right (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you expect (Score:2, Insightful)
when you take more and more of the cash companies make from them to fund an ever-expanding state and "bail-outs" (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20014563-38.html) ... *of course* it gets harder for companies to be able to afford to hire people and thus create more jobs. No sh-t. Let companies keep more of what they earn and they'll feel more comfortable hiring people, it's that simple. But all those billions floating around, it's just too tempting for governments to not want more of it.
Re:3... 2... 1... before that old H1B rant (Score:4, Insightful)
Stupid H1Bs! Stealing our jerbs!
But seriously ... H1B suffers from serious abuses. There are a lot of well-qualified americans ready to take those jobs, but companies don't want to pay what it would cost to hire those americans. It definitely does NOT do what it claims.
Re:Easy to make qualifications that nobody can mee (Score:4, Insightful)
Where are the qualified candidates!
They're already employed and fairly happy. If you want to get them to uproot and move to your company, your HR department is going to have to offer more than the standard "kinda above average" salary and "competitive" benefits.
What does the job posting look like? Is how it's worded attracting the wrong candidates?
When I was job hunting, I could always tell the "dog" jobs because they said nothing interesting about compensation besides (sometimes) "competitive pay and benefits".
Same problem as always. (Score:4, Insightful)
I see that a lot. There needs to be a differentiation between "experience" and "drawing a paycheck".
If you get hired by a company to drop workstation images onto workstation hardware ... and you do it for 10 years ... do you have 10 years of experience working with those OS's?
No. You have 1 week experience ... repeated 520 times (not counting vacations).
You have 10 years of drawing a paycheck.
That's why I prefer to test candidates myself.
Re:50% right (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots of candidates put down that they have, for instance, ten years of experience of Java. And maybe they do! But depressingly often they can't do trivial tasks
Sometimes what seems trivial to you might not to someone else. For example, I legitimately have 10 years of professional Java experience, and character encoding has been relevant to my work precisely zero times in that 10 years.
(That's not to say I probably still couldn't answer a question about it, but I think as developers we tend to take for granted that the kinds of tasks we run up against are universal.)
Software Engineering skills don't depreciate much (Score:5, Insightful)
Software development is more about problem solving and communication skills than actually writing code. These abilities don't atrophy nearly so fast. A solid developer can pick up whatever technologies are needed for jumping into an existing problem space with little effort and apply their problem solving skills.
Re:50% right (Score:5, Insightful)
My employer is hiring, both full-time and contractor. My previous employer was hiring as well. In neither case could we get qualified candidates.
Thats because HR is requiring 10 years of experience with winders 2008 server, so by definition the only resumes that make it thru the HR filtration plant are liars / con men / inside-referrals.
Re:50% right (Score:3, Insightful)
but if the economy is so bad, where are the people hammering on our door?
Whats your (approximate) pay and location? That might be the problem.
The other problem is what does the HR resume filtration system look like? Too specific, perhaps?
Also is the posting written by an idiot? (Score:5, Insightful)
Had a friend who had a long stint of unemployment. A large part of the problem was companies that use recruiters, and have morons write the job requirements. There were so many jobs that when you filtered through the bullshit, he probably could do. However he'd have to lie about his qualifications to get them, and he won't do that. Shit like "Must have 7 years experience in Ruby, Java, Perl, PHP, and MySQL." Ok so they are looking for a web app and they don't know what they want it in. Fine, he can do that, he's a real programmer in that he can learn new languages. He also has done all those. However he can't truthfully say 7 years of Ruby experience. He's got 15 years of Perl experience, but only 1 of Ruby. Doesn't mean he's bad at Ruby, just that he didn't see the need to use it till recently. However he gets filtered since he doesn't "meet the requirements" and instead they get the liar types who don't know what they are talking about.
That was actually something that the people at the job he did get commented on. He had very little Ruby experience, but generates code faster and of much higher quality than the "Ruby people." They were amazed and he had to explain that he'd done all this before, the specific language isn't really relevant.
So if you want good candidates, make sure the description is written by someone who knows what the fuck they are talking about, and that what it asks for is reasonable. Reason is a good candidate is probably also someone who's honest and thus won't lie on the app just to get in the door. Figure out what you actually need, and put down also what you'd like as optional and go with that.
No "10 years of experience with every single web related language," kind of shit. Instead something like "Someone with 5+ years of software development experience, at least some of it with web programming. Experience in one or more of the following a plus: Perl, PHP, Ruby, etc." Something that tells people what the job actually is, and gives them an idea what you want.
Re:Easy to make qualifications that nobody can mee (Score:5, Insightful)
the devil you know (and have experience with that might save you from a layoff) is better than the devil you don't. Either way, your solution is correct - a risk premium in salary or benefits are in order.
Or, if they're coasties, their house is (financially) underwater and to switch jobs they'd have to move and declare bankruptcy. I've heard this is an issue, folks whom rent can move, and are making bank, folks with houses can't move and are stuck. Even worse for security clearance type jobs where bankruptcy equals no clearance.
Re:skill fade? (Score:3, Insightful)
Getting the required industry EXPERIENCE solving real problems rather than just dicking around with it at home is not FREE. I learned Java at home. It got me precisely zero jobs. I learned C++ at night school. It got me precisely zero jobs. I managed to get EXPERIENCE in C# and SQL Server and now I have a job in that. Having no EXPERIENCE in the technology of the job you're applying for means your resume goes in the bin. At least in my experience anyway.
Re:It's called "offshore outsourcing" not unemploy (Score:5, Insightful)
All we have to do is get rid of the H1B bastards and BOOM instant high tech employment.
I love how Slashdot is dominated by liberal sentiments until it comes to our jobs, then it's 100% anti-immigration, dominated with rhetoric that sounds like theminute men [wikipedia.org]. It's sad that you were modded insightful instead of troll.
:) That's my happy dream.
What we actually need is more immigration, and more emigration, so we can all get to know each other and realize that we're all human brothers and sisters and won't want to kill each other for reading one book or another, and can be happy when someone else gets a job instead of calling them bastards.
Re:It's called "offshore outsourcing" not unemploy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:50% right (Score:3, Insightful)
In all honesty, get HR out of the way. When I was a permanent employee (ie not self-employed) and doing interviews etc., HR was the biggest problem - "Oh, they don't have this TLA that I don't know the meaning of? Into the trash!"
Re:Skills Mismatch (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes
Yes
The CEO's gotta buy his third yacht somehow. Can't make that happen if you want pay adequately or invest in the long-term health of your company. Besides, he only has to milk this company for about 2 more years for all his options to vest, so the crap will hit the fan on some other CEO's watch.
Re:3... 2... 1... before that old H1B rant (Score:5, Insightful)
That's cute that you think companies follow the rules like that...
Re:What do you expect (Score:5, Insightful)
Let companies keep more of what they earn and they'll feel more comfortable hiring people, it's that simple.
Ummm, it's not that simple. In general, corporate earnings have been improving since Q1 2010 (when the "official" recession ended). Targeted business tax cuts were instituted in 2009 as part of the stimulus package. There are still not robust increases in hiring. If you look at financial reports for companies that are having increases in earnings you find that these corporations are either (a) hoarding cash, (b) using extra cash for acquisitions, or (c) instituting share buyback programs. None of these things "hire workers". In fact, choice (b) often depresses employment, as redundancies are eliminated in the merged entities. Nor is there any indication that lowering the tax rates further at this point would encourage corporations to hire more workers, either theoretically or empirically.
Do you actually observe the economy and research these things, or do you just get your talking points from Glenn Beck?
Re:3... 2... 1... before that old H1B rant (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless someone is cheating (and there are some contracting companies that cheat badly), an H1B is no cheaper than a citizen to employ. The wages are typically slighly lower, offset by legal costs of dealing with the immigration paperwork. Legally, you have to pay an H1B market rate (and all H1B salaries are public, so it's easy to check), and since an H1B worker can change jobs, he'll leave like anyone else if you try to get too cheap (like anyone else, that can be hard right now).
Companies that don't want to pay what it would cost to hire Americans offshore the jobs, they don't muck around with H1Bs.
I can compete with H1Bs, they have the same basic costs of living I do, but there's no way to compete with the cost of living in a developing nation.
Parent has got it! (Score:5, Insightful)
My employer is hiring, both full-time and contractor. My previous employer was hiring as well. In neither case could we get qualified candidates.
Thats because HR is requiring 10 years of experience with winders 2008 server, so by definition the only resumes that make it thru the HR filtration plant are liars / con men / inside-referrals.
Whenever I see someone say that "they can't get qualified people" it's always for these reasons:
Unreasonable qualifications as the parent stated or incompetent HR. And it's not just tech skills, it's also for subjective reasons too; such as, "they wouldn't fit in" or some nonsense.
Here's an example that I over heard fixing a friend's computer who lives with an HR person that works at home. They were on a conference call and it was on speaker phone. One of the HR people came on to talk about a candidate. The candidate by her own admission had an impressive resume - all the skills, education and experience required by the job. Anyway, this person commented that when the candidate came in the room "he sucked the air out of the room" and he wouldn't be good for the company.
Now, was it brought up that the guy could have been a bit nervous because he was unemployed for several months? Nope. He was passed over because the HR person didn't think she was allowed to have enough air.
You want qualified candidates? Bypass HR.
Re:50% right (Score:2, Insightful)
when you get guys who claim to be CCNAs but don't know what traceroute does, there's a problem.
This describes about 99% of employed Network/Sys admins in the USA. I work at an enterprise/software as a service helpdesk, I fix the servers when shit goes to hell. When I have to rely on one of these retards onsite there to actually do something it is the most painful thing ever... it is seriously like guiding a 3 year old child. I do not know how these people get employed.
Slashdot is full of libertarian communists (Score:2, Insightful)
And yes, I realize that's a contradiction in terms. They are people who more or less want to be a dictator's kid. They want special privileges for them. The government should stay out of their lives, but should keep religious people from bothering them. The government should lower (or eliminate) taxes, but should provide social support for when they are unemployed. They should have the freedom to do whatever they want, but companies should be forced to hire them and not allowed to fire them. They should be allowed to hack in to someone's system if that person didn't secure it properly but nobody should be allowed to break in to their house.
More or less they want special treatment. They want whats best for themselves, and screw other people.
So none of this is a surprise. When it is immigrants coming from Mexico to work in a field they don't, then those people should be welcomed with open arms, regardless of how they got here. When it is immigrants coming from India to work in a field they do, then those people should be barred, even though they are here legally.
Re:Skills Mismatch (Score:3, Insightful)
Competent US citizens can easily get jobs abroad or in the USA. Competent foreign-born US graduates now find it difficult to remain in the USA. This means that you have an increasing number of people graduating from US universities who are not able to work in the USA. Add to this the fact that both Obama and Bush have been quite unpopular with a sizeable (although largely disjoint) subset of the population, and you get a lot of US citizens who are interested in seeking jobs elsewhere.
Skilled workers are now a lot more mobile. I think that more than half of my friends here (in the UK) come from different countries. Three are American - one just moved to Germany for a job, one is about to move to Holland for a job, and one is going to keep doing freelance work in the UK when she finishes her PhD. None of them want to return to the USA. At the same time, I have a French friend who just moved to California on an L-1 visa. He'd probably have gone earlier if the visa requirements were less strict. I know an Iranian with a PhD who does some really interesting research and was turned down for a work visa in the USA.
It's very easy for skilled Americans to get a job in Europe or Asia, but it's very difficult for skilled non-US workers to get a job in the USA.
Nice dodge of my question, try answering it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Then by all means take the political route and favor our own for once.
Answer the question: why businesses can demand perfection while individuals cannot?
Corporate Culture often creates techtards (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, there are companies out there doing it right or at least trying, but there are many who are looking to
1. Replace experienced workers with inexperienced ones at half to 2/3rds salary.
2.Hire architects to design and document complex systems and then hire the equivalent of janitors to do maintenance and upgrade work. Eventually the center cannot hold and you end up with a complex nest of band aids and workarounds worthy only of submission to TDWTF.
3.Replace creative thinking, problem solving and innovation with documentation of procedure whereby routine tasks are accomplished by following rote procedures and recipes that a trained monkey can follow, but which don't really address all the real world failure points in the process or how to even detect them much less correct them. Worse yet, since policy is to follow the procedure, updating said procedure is usually next to impossible to get approved.
Most of this comes from a fundamental mistrust and misunderstanding of the value and role of IT within an organization. IT as a whole is viewed as a sausage grinder into which many companies pour their most critical business problems and hope that what comes out is a solution everyone can stomach. IT doesn't fix business problems, it fixes Information and automation problems. If you make poor decisions and ask IT to implement them, and the whole thing goes up in flames it doesn't mean IT failed you and many companies don't seem to grasp that.
Embedded vs. webdev (Score:4, Insightful)
whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.
Huh, that doesn't seem to jive with my experience. Of course, I stayed away from the framework of the week and learned C in college. Oh look, it's still relevant.
Re:skill fade? (Score:5, Insightful)
That only works for so long, at least if we're talking about software development. Once you're a "senior developer"-level person, it stops working. You have entry level skills in your new area, but you have senior-level work experience that requires senior-level pay. Companies prefer not to hire such candidates. They assume that the candidate will produce sub-standard output if they pay at a senior rate. Or if they low-ball the rate, the candidate will jump ship as soon as they find a job in their 'core area'.
Unfortunately, not too many development companies have figured out that once you have legitimately reached a 'senior' position, picking up the new language is pretty damn trivial. Each language is solving the same problem over again, with a slightly different solution. Once you have the basic programming concepts down, it really doesn't matter what the API is called.
Re:50% right (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Six percent (Score:4, Insightful)
How do you know that they are good before you hire them? You have psychics in the HR dept? Being good is never enough to get a job. You also have to be good at selling yourself. The particular interviewer has to like you. Your particular experience has to be a good match with what the company wants. There are lots of factors besides being "good". I think the hiring system is very broken at most companies. There are so many better ways than are currently used. For a coding job there should only be one standard: code that you have already written. The applicants should have to submit the code for a fully functional application that they have written themselves from start to finish and that code should be submitted to several of your best programmers, who can grade it. The person who submits the most impressive and well written program gets the job. Is that what you do? Because if it's not then you are talking out of your ass, hiring based on all sorts of bullshit psuedo-qualifications that ultimately don't matter.
Re:3... 2... 1... before that old H1B rant (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me get this straight....you wanted a PhD for an entry-level applications engineer job, and were surprised you had trouble finding candidates?
Methinks your expectations are a tad out-of-whack.
Re:50% right (Score:1, Insightful)
So true...
Any hiring manager who wants to see what's happening in HR should go ask them to see the slush pile and spend half an hour sorting through the rejected ones... If they find only dross, then they know what's going on.
If they otherwise find good ones passed over, they need to ask whoever is doing the sorting what characteristics sent them to slush. Either the requirements are set too stringently or are being interpreted inappropriately.
Having done exactly this exercise I learned that the person doing the sorting was interpreting the 'desirables' as 'required' (actually applying a personal rule that they must have something like half of them) and rejecting 9 of 10 qualified applicants for lack of notation of experience with things like out particular source control system.
Re:What do you expect (Score:5, Insightful)
No. You obviously don't get it. The free market is "magical," as Ronald Reagan once said. The free market takes care of everybody's needs.
No big government is needed, because we can trust big business to take care of us. Don't worry about the minimum wage, because the free market will provide what you need.
What? You're not cutting it? It's your fault, you should be succeeding. If you're not, there is something wrong with you.
Trust in the Free Market! Big Business is your Friend!
Re:50% right (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, if you're hiring a junior level developer, that might a decent question to see if they have any exposure to the language.
If you're hiring a senior level developer, the proper response from the candidate is "I'd have to look up what the API is called. Since I'm here to solve hard problems, I don't spend my time memorizing near-useless trivia that I can look up in under a minute".
I really hate the stupid "we're gonna throw minutia at you" tests used for hiring. They're a useless measure of a developer who has any decent experience, and they're an annoying pitfall when you correct the errors on the test - Some interviewers don't like it when you point out the errors, and others use the errors as another test and expect those corrections.
Re:3... 2... 1... before that old H1B rant (Score:5, Insightful)
The error in expectations is the belief that a PhD would apply for an entry-level position.
Learn to write better job postings, or find out why HR threw all of the applications in the trash. Remember- it's not only the candidate's job to fill the position.
Re:3... 2... 1... before that old H1B rant (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't work that way. You're obligated to look for non-H1Bs first, and to pay your H1Bs at least market rate - you're not obligated to hire an American "at any price." What kind of sense would that make?
In any case, H1B holders often become green card holders and then citizens eventually, which is a fine outcome (an American citizen has the job at that point) and far better than the jobs going to other countries.
Re:3... 2... 1... before that old H1B rant (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't have to acquire enough wealth to retire in California (where I'm working now) - what's your point? I hear it's pretty cheap to retire in the Bahamas.
An H1B can change jobs like anyone else, so the market keeps the cost of employement basically level (H1Bs take home a bit less because some of that money goes to lawyers) at most companies.
However, some contracting companies exists solely to exploit workers in there first jobs, and some of those focus on bringing over H1Bs and lying to them about their ability to change jobs to try to keep them captive at very low pay. The government does chase after such illegal behavior, but neither the current nor previous president has had "crack down on illegal immigration practices" anywhere on their to-do list, so they get away with that crap for longer than they should.
Re:those 6% aren't looking (Score:3, Insightful)
You gotta be kidding me. I thought all the "no experience necessary" IT jobs vanished in the 80s. Your *only* requirement is a CS degree and you can't find anyone who wants the job? Are you located in Antarctica? Are you paying $2/hour? Is the particular kind of coding mind-numbingly boring for some reason? Something is wrong with your story. It just doesn't make sense. Even a single posting at any university should have gotten you lots of "qualified" applicants if you really are just looking for a bachelors in CS. If for some reason you are located in some kind of Einstein-Rosen space-time anomaly where every recent CS grad is fully employed, you might want to consider judging people by the code they can write instead of a piece of paper. Just take out the BS requirement, but mention that you require a code submission instead. I bet there are lots of people who can write superb code, but don't have a CS degree and thus can't get a job doing something that they are actually quite good at. If you want to be extra thorough have them prove to you that they understand and can use big O notation. Oh wait, instead you could just hire some Indian with lots of paper qualifications. I would highly suggest that you verify their abilities before hiring them and not rely on their degrees and certificates to show their worth.
Re:We can't find people.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Slow to hire?... If you're in the Carolinas...
I am seeing four things in the skilled sector right now:
1) People can't afford to relocate because they are underwater in their mortgages, and don't want to leave a house to rent an apartment.
2) Businesses don't feel they can pay high rates because of the current economic situation (as well as uncertainty about future personnel costs due to health reform), so they are getting applicants who want more money than budgeted since their last job payed more, but the companies know if they hire those people cheap, they will leave as soon as the economy picks up.
3) Typical lack of truly skilled and experienced people in niche fields, but companies feel they can't afford to train people right now.
4) And hiring is going slowly because you don't want to blow money hiring the wrong person, and since firing people into a 10% unemployment situation is a bit harsh, but also companies can keep people on the hook for months of a hiring process because it isn't like they are going to be hired somewhere else.
Some of this is of course stupid, but some of it is based on rational concerns.
Re:Ok (Score:5, Insightful)
[Citation Needed]
The U6 is rarely mentioned by the media regardless of the President's political party.
Re:3... 2... 1... before that old H1B rant (Score:4, Insightful)
Believe it or not, I couldn't find a single qualified US citizen or resident alien, and we did not have a mystery requirement.
I don't believe it. Either you're not looking/advertising in the right places, or you've got some requirement, stigma, or location that's utterly unappetizing to US citizens.
Go to an engineering or science program at mid level to elite university, and not many citizens are in the programs.
My PhD program is 80% or more US citizens. It's one of the top five research universities in the US. We're research upstairs, and engineering downstairs. I can't imagine that my university exists in some crazy, alternate universe from all the rest.
Re:3... 2... 1... before that old H1B rant (Score:5, Insightful)
As it happens, we were focused on interns from graduate programs in Silly Valley, and focused on second-tier schools (Google and MS and the like were so aggressive with the top tier schools it simply wasn't worth our effort there). The percentage of citizens in those graduate programs is pretty small to begin with, but still I was surprised.
Not to flame, but why is it that you were focused on second-tier graduate schools in silicon valley, yet when you were unable to fill the position from this (limited) pool, the next step was to go to an H1B? From that account it sounds like the company did exactly what everyone thinks they are doing - looked at an arbitrary extremely narrow set of potential applicants, and when that didn't pan out (surprise surprise) went straight to finding an international worker. Wouldn't it have made more sense to possibly expand your search criteria to maybe include people from outside a relatively small portion of Northern California rather than jump straight to spending the money on an H1B?
I'm also trying to figure out what second-tier programs there are in Silicon Valley (or the immediate area) that have the potential to turn out PhDs, but I'm not really coming up with much...
Complete Nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers, whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.
The only skills that depreciate that quickly are ones that any competent programmer can pick up very quickly and with very little effort. The important skills are the ones that take years to acquire, and those don't go out of date just because Magic Web Framework 3.0 gets released.
Re:Parent has got it! (Score:3, Insightful)
While there may be something to the HR observation (nobody wants to work with "the code nazi"), at the same time many developers think that HR types disturb the atmosphere and vice versa such that the people HR selects will be the worst fits.
Experience (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm a recent graduate with only two years experience, and despite phenomenal performance while in college, even getting an interview is a rare event. After losing my job, I faced over a year of unemployment despite applying for hundreds of positions, and only got my current job (web programming for near minimum wage) because I offered to do it for *free* for a local college, and they decided to hire me, instead. Even then, it's hardly steady work. If they don't have any projects, I don't have anything to do, and I'm continuing the application grind.
The whole "experience" thing is the real killer. I recently went through a few rounds of interviews at a startup for an *internship*, and despite telling me that they were impressed through the entire process, they ended up going with someone with more experience, for a no-experience-required internship, mind you.
Re:Parent has got it! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:3... 2... 1... before that old H1B rant (Score:2, Insightful)
OK, so it cost you $200K to hire a person from China. Based on what you said, I assume that it was the first one.
What's the marginal cost of a hire from China? Once you've hired one, what's the cost to hire another one?
That's why it's cheaper. A company like HP or Oracle hires 5,000 H1B people. The lawyer is paid for. The process is streamlined. It's cheap to hire one more person then.
Re:Read closer (Score:3, Insightful)
No, more like they want to hire people who can actually write programs, and more than 6% of "software engineers" don't know what they're doing.
Re:Read closer (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm an engineer, a software engineer. No, I don't give a crap if you think it's not engineering.
That guy's father sounds like an asshole.
Re:those 6% aren't looking (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's see your requirements. I'd say there is a good chance something is wrong about it. And how much is the salary?
Do keep in mind that "migrant programmers" ... those who moved from home to go to the big city, have in large numbers moved back home. You won't get them back so easily because they have experienced that it is too expensive to live there, especially considering that your company may close up shop in 6 months (can you prove it won't?) leaving them stranded. And you need to offer a pay that covers that high cost of living if you are located in places like San Francisco (and many others). What is the rent on a nice modern two bedroom apartment within 5 miles of the border of the industrial or business section you are in? Multiply that by 4 and that's what the take-home pay AFTER taxes should be.
Re:50% right (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I suppose one could argue working with character encodings isn't universal, but I think it's pretty darn close. Any program that interacts with users outside the USA will have to deal with this at some point
Yeah, see... that's my 10 years of experience. Literally none of it had international implications.
For example, I spent about a year working on a project relating to selling a product that could only be sold in one of the 50 states, much less outside of the USA.
A different project would only ever have clients who were active duty US military.
Another would only have clients living in a particular metro area.
Another (ironically, most of the dev team were UK nationals) by the nature of the industry would only have American users.
And so on. You get the idea.
My experience isn't one year of experience repeated ten times. It was done in different states for many different clients in half a dozen very different industries. It used a variety of databases, frameworks, ORM tools, IDEs, etc. Most were web projects, but the other 40% or so are all over the map.
And yet for all of that I've never, professionally, needed to do something you think is ubiquitous.
Food for thought. I'm not trying to pick on you specifically, I've just seen this kind of thing a lot in tech interviews (more ones I've sat in on than ones I gave or had to pass) -- a guy who's spent all his time doing web apps asks what he thinks are ridiculously basic questions to a guy who's mostly done services and embedded work and console apps and ends up thinking he doesn't know anything, etc.
Have you ever noticed (Score:3, Insightful)
that these "cutting-edge skills" that employers always complain are so hard to find in job candidates are always left undefined? That's because if they name them they'll receive thousands of resumes from unemployed software developers who already have those skills.
Re:How many repliers here actually interview and h (Score:3, Insightful)
Given the evidence that many long-employed software developers fail to pass your test, you can't figure out why companies have been paying them all these years rather than wondering how you can improve your interview process to lower the number of false negatives.
Re:Read closer (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:50% right (Score:3, Insightful)
Good points, and it seems the list of requirements is often excessive because employers don't want to invest into training. So instead of hiring someone with generally good skills and giving him a few months to learn the specifics of the job, they insist on somone who already knows all the tools in the work environment.
When they don't find that perfect candidate, they whine about a lack of qualified candidates.
Re:50% right (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, this is my point exactly. They've also probably skipped over a few otherwise qualified candidates because they didn't have the proper thing they were looking for in the education/experience sections.
Also, everyone, everywhere, seems to be looking for 5+ years experience. That doesn't happen. Yes if you're looking for a project manager or something, 5 years experience is a good qualification to look for but usually then they'll tack on "in Project Management" which again, isn't going to happen. Instead the 5 years experience is something like "senior programmer" or some such.
Re:Six percent (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're going to argue by anecdote, then I should point out that most of the unemployed folks I know are smart and capable, but are out of work because they were viewed as too old, too young, or were just plain unlucky. A lot of them got caught in layoffs, where the boss got the word from on high that he needed to fire 10 people, and because the boss had built up an effective team those 10 people were pretty good at what they did. And because all the local firms (including startups) that hire lots of developers, were in layoff mode rather than hiring mode, they were screwed.
Another way of looking at it: for every open position in the US, there are 6 unemployed workers trying to get it. Now, to give you the benefit of the doubt, we'll say 4 of those 6 are people you wouldn't hire. That means that a perfectly qualified and capable person has a 50% shot at best of getting a job. Which one gets it probably will be decided by nepotism, height (seriously, taller people do better), who's friends with who, race and gender, and what order people are interviewed in.