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.'"
Re:50% right (Score:3, Interesting)
Cutting-edge? How about just getting someone that lives up to their resume? My employer is hiring, both full-time and contractor. My previous employer was hiring as well. In neither case could we get qualified candidates. I don't know if it's just applicants misrepresenting themselves or headhunters just throwing something against a wall and hoping it sticks, but when you get guys who claim to be CCNAs but don't know what traceroute does, there's a problem.
I know the above doesn't apply to everyone, but really, if you're applying for a job at least crack a book the night before the interview so you're not wasting everyone's time.
Re:50% right (Score:3, Interesting)
jaymzter didn't actually say his employers required a CCNA, he said that candidates who claimed to have one didn't have any networking skills. Not the same thing.
I see this as well when interviewing. 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, like select a random element from an array. Or they fail at understanding what happens under the hood, eg, they have no idea what garbage collection or a character encoding is.
The skills/requirements mismatch is a real issue, it's not simply a matter of evil CEOs wanting to smoke even fatter cigars at the workers expense.
Skills Mismatch (Score:2, Interesting)
So, let's do some logic here.
U.S.A. citizens get their training at U.S.A. universities.
Countries around the world send their citizens to U.S.A. universities.
Skill mismatch? Where do the foreign folks get their unique skills? Should the U.S.A. be sending folks abroad to universities?
Is the unique skill "low cost"? Are businesses finding it totally unacceptable to train their employees?
Does this mean employees are throwaway after five years since "the next big thing" has come out and it did not exist when they went to school?
Re:Easy to make qualifications that nobody can mee (Score:3, Interesting)
hey'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.
Not necessarily sure about the "fairly happy". It may also be that in an insecure economy, 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.
Re:No kidding (Score:5, Interesting)
Especially since the national average is over 9% currently. Seems to me a more accurate story would be "Tech sector hasn't recovered to previous levels, but has much lower unemployment than many other areas."
Presuming that the majority of people in the tech sector have at least a 4 year college degree and thus average nearly the same unemployment rates as other primarily white-collar sectors, I believe "soaring" is appropriate.
This chart [mybudget360.com] shows that people in that category have had no more than 3% unemployment for nearly the last 20 years - including the dot-bomb fall-out. Given that unemployment was roughly 2% before the latest crash, a 200% increase is pretty drastic.
Re:Six percent (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Six percent (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed. Six percent? One in eighteen? Consider the people whom you know who are out of work. Are there at least one out of eighteen whose behavior or lack of skills means they're unemployed for a REASON? Consider the people whom you know who do have work. Are at least one of eighteen of those people whom you think are more of a liability than an asset?
I know several IT/engineering folks who are out of work. With perhaps one exception, I wouldn't hire any of the individuals in question. They're slackers, or in way over their heads, or behave badly in a professional environment. Sure, I'd have a beer with 'em, but hire them? No. That's a higher standard. Wages don't have anything to do with it; the people in question I wouldn't take on at any price.
Tech is doing just fine, at least here in San Jose. I get daily emails or calls from recruiters, my company has unfilled jobs (and is offering a bounty for referrals), and I know that others have the same experience. I'm no hot-shot super-star either, I'm almost 50 (so it's not a cheap-because-I'm-young factor) and it surely isn't because of my looks. I read the required H1B notices that get pinned to the break-room cork board that include the position and salary; we are certainly not lowballing imported labor (I have yet to see one that was less than six figures).
If you're good, you're in.
Other regions may differ; I can't speak to that.
Re:3... 2... 1... before that old H1B rant (Score:4, Interesting)
I have to agree here. I was forced to go the H1B route at my last job to hire an entry level applications engineer. Believe it or not, I couldn't find a single qualified US citizen or resident alien, and we did not have a mystery requirement. It was a solid technical person, engineer, that anyone with a EE or even a physics degree could have done. Just no early career people to fill the role (it was a junior applications engineer role).
It probably cost us the better part of $200K by the time we were done to hire someone from China, after legal and all the fees. The pay was good for the area as well, $80K target, and I would have easily gone to $100K for someone with a couple years experience or a PhD.
Of course, it wasn't IT, and I will probably get my karma dinged by this, but the US is just not turning out home grown talent in mathematics, engineering, physics and chemistry to fill these opportunities. Go to an engineering or science program at mid level to elite university, and not many citizens are in the programs.
Very sad
Re:3... 2... 1... before that old H1B rant (Score:4, Interesting)
From his comment, we wanted anyone with a EE degree, but would have been willing to pay an extra $20k if needed to hire someone with a PhD, rather then the normal rejecting of that candidate for being overqualified/too expensive.
From my own experience, we ran an internship program a couple of summers ago, and really would have preferred to hire citizens/green card holders, as the legal costs are quite high relative in the total salary cost of an intership. We got exactly 0 applications from citizens and green card holders, and so had to pay the extra if we wanted to have the internship program at all (of course, that's not directly H1Bs, but we then sponsored the people we kept permanently).
Re:Six percent (Score:4, Interesting)
What do you suggest? Hire everybody then fire most? HR doesn't decide who's in. They just do the paperwork. The hiring manager, with input from their team, does.
Yes, we have a coding test, even for QA. We also do background checks to weed out people who are argumentative, confrontational, slackers, or can't stay on the good side of the law (meaning real crimes, not irrelevant stuff like "caught with a lid in college"). We have plenty of ways of knowing they're good before we hire them. So do most companies. It's not rocket science (unless that's the position, of course).
It's not "talking out of my ass", thank you very much.
As for "written entirely by themselves"... coders who have never had to work on a team, work on others' code, or have others work on their code will have a very bad time on a team of more than one. You have to be able to write to coding standards that differ from your personal habits whether you like it or not, you have to be able to read code written in a style other than your own, you have to produce code others can understand and maintain, and you have to do it without turning into Smartass Simpsons Comic Book Guy. Doing it all yourself demonstrates very little of that. A REAL coding test would be to hand someone existing, broken code and tell them to fix it, in the coding style shown... without bitching.
If someone is a standalone coder, then they're not interviewing anyway since they're already working for themself, right? Then they can be as prima dona as they like. Anybody else, check your ego at the door.
When I interview, I am on the lookout for more than just raw skills. I look for Apple haters. They don't get hired. I look for Windows haters. They don't get hired. I look for people who turn into raging assholes on hour fourteen in a row on the Sunday night before release. They don't get hired. Not being a jerk is a requirement, not an "plus", and that is not negotiable. And not to put too fine a point on it, I also look for people who think they know what "bullshit psuedo-qualifications ultimately don't matter". They don't get hired here either.
Re:3... 2... 1... before that old H1B rant (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, but the additional expenses ("legal fees and red tape") for hiring 25 H1B workers is no more than for hiring 1.
Yes, the H1B is being abused something awful. But that's just par for the course for American business: abuse workers no matter if they're Americans or not.
And anyone who tells you that companies are holding off on hiring "because they're so unsure about Health Care Reform/Taxes/or name your Obama Administration policy" they are lying to you. They are holding off on hiring because they're having so much success making their current employees work a lot harder, for longer hours and for lower wages and benefits. When Germany would be shortening hours so that more people can stay employed (which allows them to stay in their homes, feed their families, keep the economy working), America just makes laying off employees more attractive to companies.
American business loves it when there's fear in the employment market. In fact, Ben Bernake some years ago, when he was talking about rising unemployment due to monetary policy, said that it's a good thing to make sure "workers don't get too comfortable".
This is why the US is now a second-rate nation on the decline. Because our society values corporate profits above the labor of citizens. And any first year economics student can tell you, Labor precedes Capital, not the other way around. If you think it's bad here now, just wait 12-15 years. Adult literacy is declining, so we're going to be having even more low-information voters. We're going to think these were the good old days.
Re:3... 2... 1... before that old H1B rant (Score:3, Interesting)
I've interviewed a lot of people for the company I currently work for. We have quite a few H1B employees because we *can't* find enough qualified people to fill our slots. We've got people on board from India, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and probably a lot of places I am not thinking of at the moment. We made an offer recently to a guy from Italy. We also have a ton of U.S. citizen employees (including me), but just finding qualified people is hard. Limiting our pool to U.S. citizens would make it impossible.
We're still trying to hire more people, so if qualified Americans come to our attention we'll hire them too.
Re:50% right (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm with GP on this one, it is very depressing how often supposedly experienced developers cannot solve simple problems. And I am saying this as a fairly junior developer, I only graduated a little under four years ago. In one year at my current employer, I have sat in on a dozen interviews, and we have two simple programming tests. First, the candidate must write a function/method on a whiteboard -- in their language of choice -- which takes a String, and prints "c,v" where c is the number of consonants in the string, and v is the number of vowels. Four candidates out of the dozen managed to write down something resembling a correct solution. For the second test, the candidate is asked to write a simple four-function calculator, in their environment/language of choice, with full Internet access. We even allow them to bring in their own machine, if they have some custom dev environment they are more comfortable using. Three have passed that test. Only one of those managed to finish without some hints from the observing developers.
This is far from throwing stupid trivia questions at the candidate. The philosophy here is: if a candidate cannot even solve a trivial problem with their own environment and full access to the Internet for documentation, code samples, etc.; then can we have any confidence at all that the candidate will do any better on the complex problems that we are hiring to get solved?
You ain't seen nothing yet.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Something I put together: http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery [google.com]
I predict we'll see continually increasing unemployment (short of massive government intervention in make-work ways). To cope with massive unemployment, we need a new economic paradigm (some mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, and improved local subsistence in stronger face-to-face communities).
Frankly, as programmer who's been working with computers for 30 years or so, I can confidently say that the business world would have much software if there was a lot less paid business app developers (who seem mostly to make work for each other). :-)
How many basic accounting packages do we really need? You write a modular one in Lisp or Smalltalk, and you are good to go for the entire globe. Lisp plus some libraries under version control basically is your accounting package. If you need something fancy, you write a module to do it and load it in dynamically. And since the authors get abstraction, and also are just great developers, the system is designed to be easily expandable... There can be a 1000X difference in programmer productivity, not even including negative productivity... A handful of poor programmers pushes everyone towards dumbed down tools and just creates lots of work maintaining poorly thought out systems.
Note, that you may well want a domain specific language written in Lisp, or domain specific classes written and accessed in Smalltalk for non-programmers to use, but essentially, that is still just Lisp and Smalltalk. See:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1069786 [ycombinator.com]
""Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." - Philip Greenspun"
Still, I think everyone should know something about programming, just to be an informed citizen, and programming is fun, and people should have choices, and sometimes new breakthrough stuff comes from diverse experiments, and there is a lot of very useful programming everyone can do in areas of educational simulation, scientific modeling, and such. I'm all for everyone coding. I'm all for a diversity of approaches.
But the fact is, I have not seen that much stuff that is better than Lisp and Smalltalk (OK, maybe with C or Forth translated from Lisp and Smalltalk for device drivers... :-) Really, whatever one can say about the wonders of almost any language, you can just write in Lisp and translate to those languages (and build tools to do debugging). And those are old, old languages. But they are great languages (and environments) that can make people far more productive, and they have been able to do that for decades. Now we have stuff like Eclipse, that lets people create boiler plate Java code even faster -- but why do you really want to pollute the universe with endless boilerplate code that someone has to comb through looking for gotchas? So, more makework...
Note, by Lisp I mean a whole family of related programming languages that have easily adopted new paradigms... And by Smalltalk, I mean, well Smalltalk. :-) And if 90% of programmers can't get Lisp syntax, well, back to my first point, the word would be better off without them doing business development. Note: you obviously want programmers who can both code and get the human and social side of things, so again, winnow programmer employment further and you are better off with less work being made for each other. Less code written is less code that needs to be maintained, tested, or debugged.
Instead, we have Java and C# as coding for those who can't get abstractions... But it becomes a standard everyone is stuck programming in, as a leveler. Just silly, really, but it bulks up employment numbers
Re:Read closer (Score:3, Interesting)
Funny you should say that, because I was just thinking today that the company I work for (big multinational) has about 4000 people in the Information Technology group, but it seems like only about 40 actually do any coding. The rest of us are architects, business analysts, testers, project managers, etc, who tell the 40 how to do their job.
Maybe 40 is an exaggeration but it isn't off by much!
hiring is dysfunctional (Score:3, Interesting)
Sad that even with unemployment at record highs, somehow companies still have the gall to whine that they can't find qualified people. Granted there's a lot of lying on resumes. But those making the hiring decisions still make amazingly poor calls even accounting for that.
My most recent experience was with this crazy recruiting agency. You can't persuade them to send your info to their clients. They filter out people for the most astonishingly flimsy reasons. They wanted a C++ programmer, and I have many years of that, in addition to lots of other things like an advanced degree. Next thing I'm being told in a roundabout way is that my resume isn't good enough. The recruiter decided that 5 of those years didn't count because it was teaching, so just like that I'm not experienced enough. He pushed me to put more stuff on my resume. Didn't say I should exaggerate mightily, but the implication was strong. And he didn't like it that I'd been out of work for 8 months. Meant my skills had faded. Or there was something wrong with me. Must be some good reasons why no one wanted to hire me. The next day, he sent me a short email informing me that the job had been filled, and thanking me for my hard work. Hard work? Am I to believe any of that?
I'm sure an experience like that is typical. It says loud and clear that there is no shortage of people. When employers and recruiters reach like that to find reasons why people aren't suitable, the obvious reason is that they're swamped with job seekers.
I haven't even been trying to find a job. I'll get interested again when some sanity returns to hiring practices, unemployment comes down, and I need more money. Or if someone seeks me out for a great job, something interesting where I actually get to work out good algorithms for difficult problems, not be a dull business application code monkey banging out cheesy scripts that barely deserve being called programs. Slashdot posted a story a few days ago about startups not being able to find good people. I've done that sort of thing several times, and I like it. But I have little faith that they're serious, that they aren't all talk and no action. And there's the matter of pay. No, I won't work on someone else's fantastic idea at minimum wage plus stock options that could go underwater without warning. And no, $50K per year on 1099 doesn't cut it in those places where housing and rent is still insanely expensive. Why don't you move your company out of such places, or encourage telecommuting? Until things improve, don't see why I should waste time hunting. I have plenty of my own ideas I can work on for free. I'd rather spend my time exploring fun sorts of coding and research unlikely to be done on typical job, looking into starting my own business, and working on these ideas I have for technical books.
Re:How many repliers here actually interview and h (Score:3, Interesting)