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.'"
Read closer (Score:4, Informative)
IT is not engineering. The two fields are not analogous
Re:Read closer (Score:5, Funny)
They're digitalous?
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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.
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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!
Re:Read closer (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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I've often heard it said (and it makes sense to me) that much of the argument here is over the difference between this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer [wikipedia.org]
and this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Engineer [wikipedia.org]
Where the later is "registered or licensed within certain jurisdictions to offer professional services directly to the public" and "The professional status and the actual practice of professional engineering is legally defined and protected by a government body."
It makes no difference to me, but
Re:Read closer (Score:4, Informative)
"Engineer carries with it a liability as you are responsible for your actions in a way that a software programmer is not."
I hear this said a lot and don't see it in the real world. Engineering companies, just like software companies, enter into contracts to provide services to a set quality and schedule with penalties if these are not met. Liability of an individual engineer doesn't enter into it in either case.
And the reason I am not a "Professional Engineer" in the accredited sense is because accreditation is not settled yet. I have no problem considering myself, with a degree and a decade's experience, an Engineer in all the same ways.
Six percent (Score:4, Informative)
Sure, it's not great but it's perhaps not as terrible a crisis as newspapers would like to make out; considering how every section of the economy is impacted right now I would read too much into it.
No kidding (Score:4, Informative)
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."
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.
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By "real unemployment rate" people usually mean the U6 number [bls.gov], which includes those whose unemployment has expired, discouraged workers, and those working part time for economic reasons (underemployed). This is also know as the "Repbulican president unemployment number", as the press has a habit of reporting the big number when a Republican is in charge, and the small number (the U3) when Democrat is in charge.
The U3 and the U6 are both interesting. The U3 is the most objectively measurable, and so is go
Re:Ok (Score:5, Insightful)
[Citation Needed]
The U6 is rarely mentioned by the media regardless of the President's political party.
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 co
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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: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: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.
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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 deve
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.
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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 rea
Re:50% right (Score:5, Insightful)
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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
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.)
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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
Re:50% right (Score:5, Informative)
It is a real issue, but HR is the most massive problem in the IT sector today. They get a list of requirements and filter based on those. Many of the folks that have those requirements that are unemployed are unemployed for good reason. There are however a whole slew of people that could do the job that don't have exactly those requirements that get thrown in the trash by many an HR clerk.
In my experience the above is the leading cause of IT understaffing. Personally I look for a "Skills" section on a resume, and test the claimed skills in an interview. If they can get past my cursory test they're worth a shot, if they are just good at BSing then its obvious within a month, or at least well within their 3 month probationary period. You get more quality employees that are actually interested in what they are doing that way. Of course you end up interviewing more complete idiots as well, but its no loss, as you were going to interview (approximately, again, in my experience) the same amount of unsuitable candidates regardless.
Its partly a problem of the jargon too. Most of the HR folks aren't going to have a clue how your previous job relates to this one or how your own pet projects relate to the job you are applying for, but for an engineer say, they realize that working as building designer for 5 years necessarily includes that you have a lot of civil engineering requirements even if you don't have a degree in civil engineering. If you have 10 years experience working in C with some minor experience in Java but the job requires almost pure Java, the HR girl/guy likely doesn't have a clue how the skills could be transferable and will dump you in favor of someone with a college/uni degree that focused on Java at some point, meanwhile they end up firing the guy because he cheated his way through school and doesn't actually have a clue.
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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.
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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
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Well, those job listings/employers who require or say they require all sorts of certifications and knowledge of areas that you never actually end up using in the job probably cause a lot of people who "inflate" their resumes or outright lie, hoping to just get past the filter and sort it out later. The thing about certs from vendors like Cisco or RedHat is its pretty easy to check on the veracity of the claim as to whether the candidate even has the certificate or not, even without doing your own skills as
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.
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I suffer with this also, and it seems like every time I see one of these complaints (e.g. doesn't know traceroute), it is for something even I know (e.g. traceroute), even though it is waaaaay remote from my day to day work. Depressing.
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.
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.
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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.
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
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As a Sysadmin I totally agree. Any Net/Sys admin that works for any of the big contract companies is probably brain damaged. We had one replace a piece of fiber on their end, that terminated a 24x7 needed private link. He refused to tell anyone until everyone including all telcos involved pointed the finger at him. He did this to test this suspected bad piece of fiber. There were 4 hours of 20 or so folks time wasted because he was testing a cable that could not be worth more than $30.
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...
Kill the temp loophole. (Score:2)
If it costs as much to offshore it or temp it as much as it does to do it properly, those ways of "hiring" might not look so good as a loophole.
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My company cant find competent C++ developers to develop desktop applications. I don't think their requirements are totally out of line since I was hired in the last 6 months. We would like our develpers to understand inheritance and const and some basics of polymorphism. We develop on windows, linux and the mac and proficiency in any one of those goes a long way.
The pay here is reasonable though not overwhelmingly awesome it is certainly in line with the area.
We have managed to find one good hire since
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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?
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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!"
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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.
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I'd really like to see someone who can solve trivial problems in java. Maybe our internal recruitment team just sucks, but I just did yet another interview with a candidate who got stuck for almost 3 minutes trying to figure out why eclipse was complaining about their HashMap<String>.
Where are the qualified candidates!
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".
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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
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.
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.
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Like the Helpdesk position I read once that wanted someone with Java, C++ experience and the ability to write his own support tools.
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I can picture that at a small company. Sometimes it's a budget stretch to hire two different people for those roles. E.g., you have some highly technical, low volume product with a very small number of support calls, you don't need to fund a full support staff, and in fact, maybe you want the one guy doing this to do some IT work for you too. You could pay the right, capable person 1.5-2x a normal salary for simple helpdesk, and still save money.
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.
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?
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: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)
6% high? thats about 2/3s the national average. (Score:2)
I prefer the 6% unemployment rate in my industry compared to the unemployment rate in my sisters field of expertise (architectural engineering), IIRC it is above 20%.
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 the
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How about pre-empting them and putting all our own in first? Train our own, hire our own, prosper with our own.
Then there might be a leg to stand on regarding complaints.
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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.
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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 a
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: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: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!
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.
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.
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.
Talent (Score:3, Informative)
The job situation in I.T. has nothing to do with talent, much like manufacturing has nothing to do with American Unions.
Pure and simple, they want slave labourers that live in dormitories and once they get old you throw them in the oven.
We have the slave labor camps and dormitories, we just don't have the ovens yet back in vogue.
The surf sector, I mean the service sector economy is a direct goal of this.
Do you people honestly believe in any of the people you vote for? Do you think congress is stupid?
Quite to the contrary, congress and the people who pull their strings know exactly what would happen if you took away manufacturing.
It was planned. It will continue...and they won't stop till everyone is living in a dormitory in public housing and you have nothing left.
-Hack
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: (Score:2)
3...2...1...before that old NAZIS rant
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: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.
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: (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
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:3... 2... 1... before that old H1B rant (Score:5, Informative)
I DO know the rules, and I have also seen first hand how the companies that abuse them are evading them. The most common strategy is to list an impossible requirement, and then miraculously find that the foreigner they want to hire happens to have that on his resume. Miracle of miracles, the job is filled. Meanwhile, to get an american to do the job would have cost 2-3x the 'prevailing wage', so they have a huge financial win.
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: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: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: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: (Score:3, Informative)
I didn't expect any PhD's to apply. I said it would be a bonus, and that I would stretch my salary range $20K to accommodate. The last time I hired one of these roles was in 1998, and I had been inundated with strong PhD's from a variety of physics programs eager for the opportunity. The one we hired was great and still is in the same company (ironically, he moved to Marketing and is a great resource there).
HR didn't throw any resume's in the trash. We just got garbage. I was serious that we just got n
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...
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: (Score:3, Informative)
Just no early career people to fill the role (it was a junior applications engineer role).
As someone who has been desperate for a job--any job--and been turned down for having "too much experience" may I please extend a hearty "Fuck You" to you, your company, and anyone affiliated with your program.
Do you really think some 55 year-old with boatloads of experience gives a rat's ass if a job is "junior" when they're just trying to keep a roof over their head?
It probably cost us the better part of $200K by the
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: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: (Score:3)
Wouldn't Fiorina be unable to take the oath... (Score:2)
...for already being beholden to foreign offshoring interests?
I would hope that they say "...and we recognize the Senator from India, Carly Fiorina"
Re: (Score:2)
Stability * (Score:2)
It's one thing to be able to do that, it's another to have tons of people able to do that. Sounds like you would have no problem either way.
No thank you, but some stability is all that is asked, for the majority.
Re: (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: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: (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 bachelor
Re: (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
Re: (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
Re: (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: (Score:3, Interesting)