IT Job Hiring Slumps 250
snydeq writes The IT job hiring bump earlier this year wasn't sustained in July and August, when numbers slumped considerably, InfoWorld reports. 'So much for the light at the end of the IT jobs tunnel. According to job data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as analyzed by Janco Associates, the IT professional job market has all but lost the head of steam it built up earlier this year. A mere 3,400 IT jobs were added in August, down from 4,600 added for July and way down from the 13,800 added in April of this year. Overall, IT hiring in 2014 got off to a weak start, then surged, only to stumble again.' Anybody out there finding the IT job market discouraging of late and care to share their experiences?
No one does anything over the summer (Score:3, Insightful)
The peak times for jobs seem to be autumn and winter - everyone is on vacation over the summer. No one does anything. Anyone still around is covering for the people on vacation. Interviews and hiring are really low priorities. This fall, people will start thinking about next year's projects.
Re: No one does anything over the summer (Score:5, Informative)
Finally, somebody cut to the chase rather than going off on some other tangent. Glad I read this far to find your post.
Little hiring occurs in the summer. All the decision makers are on vacation or taking half days. Project money (and, hiring money) from the budget is getting low. Projects started when they had money are established.
Come autumn, there is a need to burn off excess budget moneybags- use it or lose it. Lots of little projects are started, projects get defined at a high level and budget requests for the next year are made. If a department does use their allocated budget, they will see a drop for the new year without extenuating circumstances.
Early winter, there is a flurry to hire people, likely contractors, to do the little stuff. Real hiring starts at the beginning of the year and runs through the remainder of the quarter.
We aren't seasonal workers like retail. Our work force isn't returning to school creating a need for immediate hires. Where we run into problems is when management treats employees like disposable contractors only to find they need to hire later rather than pace the work and retain their workforce.
In America (Score:5, Informative)
IT Job Hiring in the USA Slumps
FTFY
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A meaningful distinction, but have you tried getting hired in Europe as an American? It's kind of intense. I'm still working on it. :b
(Still, certain it's far better than the other way around).
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But still only offering what, in other times, would have been considered an entry-level salary.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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I don't cede this point. Nor would the majority of those who actually study and think about this stuff.
Lol, get real... (Score:3)
The solution is aggressive immigration control, especially deportation of most immigrants at this point. Legal or illegal, doesn't matter.
So you want to deport legal immigrants :)
Ha ha... That's just stupid, by the very definition of legal..
government in Tennessee cracked down on immigration violations, suddenly businesses that relied on low and unskilled workers
Few IT jobs are occupied by low and unskilled workers... Why don't you take unenlightened anti-immigration rant somewhere else...
the real question is how many H1Bs are actually doing exceptional work versus simply being cheaper?
I'm an H1-B, relocated from Denmark, working in SF, and I can assure you that I'm not cheaper :)
.....we could free up several hundred thousand jobs that should be going to Americans.
If my H1-B was revoked I would move to an EU office for the same company, doing the same job, at approximately same salary.
My point is this, Silicon Valley can't be the tech hub, if
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Programming, IT, Networking can be done from almost anywhere --
But it is NOT done from almost anywhere. The option to outsource overseas exists NOW and has always existed, AND would be yet cheaper than an H1B hire. The competition is entirely within U.S. borders.
There is no slump in open positions (Score:5, Interesting)
The companies say there aren't enough IT workers. The IT workers say there aren't enough jobs. It really comes down to there being huge numbers of IT workers but very few good ones.
As someone who educates CS students, I see the whole spectrum. There are lots of students who seriously have no interest in learning the material. All they care about is getting a diploma. Where I teach, those students don't make it all the way through the program, due to a combination of poor grades and being caught cheating. But when I was getting my undergrad degree, I was always angry about the fact that employers couldn't distinguish my A's from those of people who didn't actually learn the material.
Not surprisingly, supply and demand is a factor here. With low numbers of CS students, standards have to be lowered to keep the tuition revenue going. As the student population grows beyond capacity, schools are able to be more selective based on SAT scores, high school GPAs, and weed-out courses.
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Three issues going on here:
* Not enough IT professionals who can code.
* HR people are still looking for people with 23 years of experience with Ruby on Clouds
* Really awful management that either has no tech experience/education or is someone who sucked at IT who got promoted.
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Hopefully, you meant that the employers weren't looking at GPAs and not that the people who weren't learning the material were still getting As.
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The companies say there aren't enough IT workers. The IT workers say there aren't enough jobs. It really comes down to there being huge numbers of IT workers but very few good ones.
It really comes down to companies not being willing to train. So they don't look for good IT workers. They look for IT workers who have the skills they already want. Actually being good employees is secondary. They'll actually fire a good employee (one who fits in with the culture, and wants to work) to hire one with the skill set they're looking for.
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Or, alternatively, very few companies willing to pay for good work. Minimum wage = minimum effort. This is not limited to IT, but extends to every industry and occupation. Yet for some strange reason the notion that table scraps entitle you to heroic efforts rather than hatred and resentment persists.
IT Job Market (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been keeping my eye on the job market, at least for my area, for the last five years. Which is how long it's been since I lost my good job, as a network admin, and have had to scramble to fill the gap. I spent an entire year being told I was overqualified, to much experience, or underqualified, not having a bachelors degree, for the small number of positions available. In the end with nothing coming up I did what made the most sense and went back to school for a bachelors degree as that was something I got told every time they decided I was underqualified.
To start like almost always happens no credits carried over from my associates degree to my bachelors degree, so I've had to start from scratch. I haven't really learned much of anything I hadn't before during this process and if anything some of my technical skills have withered from not being used. I took a student employee job with the IT department at the university, because at least they were happy to have someone competent but as a student employee I have a fixed wage at minimum wage and no more than 15 hours of work per week. It looked like I might get a full time job with them last year when one of the admins left, but the powers that be decided their was no money to replace a person who had been paid from a specific grant (so they wanted to free up that money to go elsewhere while the grant still calls for that position to be paid). It's my last year here and I now have five years of looking at the market.
The market in my region has been stagnant. A few companies are hiring in my region, but with questions about whether you are on an H1b or not and sky high requirements for those positions... I know I'm not the one they want. If I apply anyways I get near instant feedback they I'm not qualified for their position even when I meet all the stated requirements. I would move, but I simply can't afford that and most companies don't seem interested in talking to me if I don't live within a hundred miles of them. Even that isn't a perfect fix anyways... Their seems to be a half a dozen US cities with insane amounts of IT industry activity, about 30 with sustained IT activity, and the rest of the top 100 cities (one of which I live by) are anemic for IT and always have been. I could never seriously afford to live in any of those cities so many of us in IT work in: San Fransisco, Seattle, Austin, etc. I wouldn't be hired by Google or the others anyways, they prefer fresh young talent and I'm in my mid-30s now.
I'm looking into non-traditional computer related fields, because that is pretty much my last hope to have something when I'm done.
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When you finish your degree companies will be jumping to hire you under the impression you will work harder for less (which is fine for a year or two). They will pay to relocate you to a better city if you want too. It seems like you are doing the right thing going back to school. Maybe you could land a p/t telecommuting gig instead of student work?
good luck!
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To start like almost always happens no credits carried over from my associates degree to my bachelors degree, so I've had to start from scratch.
This only happens when people get an associates in IT / basketweaving / etc. Getting an Associates of Science/Arts will transfer nearly 100% of the time. If your associates degree was filled with classes like networking, web design, A+ cert study prep, etc. then those classes will absolutely not transfer to a BS degree. But if you were taking English, Sociology, Chemistry, Art History, etc. then they will transfer to any school (as long as the grades were good, usually C or above but sometimes B or above).
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My associates is in Computer Science: Networking and even college Algebra didn't transfer. In no way can you tell me that college algebra (which is taught to the standards of accreditation) is somehow different. Your assumption of an Associates is a bit skewed. Basic classes exist across the divide of schools that need to be met so you can give a degree. The University I went to however is not obligated to take credits form any other school.
Though yes, my associates degree was about being able to actually d
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My associates is in Computer Science: Networking
This is not an AS or AA degree, so it is very unlikely that the credits will transfer. You may not like it, and I may agree with you that it is kind of dumb, but you get two choices for an Associates Degree:
1) A useful education that will not transfer towards a Bachelors Degree (aka Hands on Associates Degree)
2) A questionably useful general education that will transfer towards a Bachelors Degree (aka Associates of Science/Arts)
even college Algebra didn't transfer. In no way can you tell me that college algebra (which is taught to the standards of accreditation) is somehow different.
Transferring an Associates Degree is often an all or nothing endeavor. If you ha
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It's time to move the degree system over to some kind of a badges systems and or have forced credit transfer
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The market in my region has been stagnant. A few companies are hiring in my region
I would move, but I simply can't afford that
While it is more likely that your job problems are caused by something you aren't aware of or aren't forthcoming about (like your previous network admin job being little more than first tier tech support), if the job market is really that bad then you really have to move. There should be hundreds of companies hiring in your region unless you live in some rural town in Kentucky. If there are really just a few companies hiring for IT positions, then this is not the best place to live as an IT professional.
I w
Indy (Score:3)
Do NOT come to Indianapolis for IT!
Pay rates are low even adjusted for the cost of living (which is dirt cheap for a northern city) and IT workers get ZERO respect unless you are working for a profit center (you are doing IT staffing, contracting or are a programmer writing product to be sold).
Between H1Bs and large contracting pushing down rates and squeezing out locals at the big operations (Lilly, Sallie Mae, Allison, Caterpillar, etc.) about the only good place for IT long term is working for state or t
Re:IT Job Market (Score:4, Informative)
While it is more likely that your job problems are caused by something you aren't aware of or aren't forthcoming about (like your previous network admin job being little more than first tier tech support), if the job market is really that bad then you really have to move. There should be hundreds of companies hiring in your region unless you live in some rural town in Kentucky. If there are really just a few companies hiring for IT positions, then this is not the best place to live as an IT professional.
I was living in a small semi-rural college town when the first company I worked for as a programmer when bankrupt in 2008. I tried for two years (starting before the company went under) trying to find work in the same area with no luck. Not a single phone interview even. So I finally gave up and moved to the more heavily populated suburbs outside the largest city in my region. I didn't have to move to an area with high rents, just a place where I could have an hour or so commute to the city.
After moving I found a job in three weeks. This was after two years of no luck in my rural town.
My 'network admin' job was the sole IT person for a charter school with several hundred people. I did the job of a director of technology, a network admin, and a support person all in one. Maybe you should stop being condescending?
My region (Northwestern PA) has had a handful of job openings at any time and a population of 908,367 people. Some of those jobs I really don't have the skills for such as requiring experience in SAP/SME, Sharepoint, Webfocus, SAS, etc which basically require that you've had a job working with those technologies to get them. I could lie, but frankly while I know what those technologies are, I certainly couldn't answer questions about them. Some I couldn't get right now because they have a hard requirement of a Bachelors degree. What is left I often have been applying for, degree be damned.
I could move to Pittsburgh or Philly except I really cannot afford to move. I've been living on ~$500/month for four years. I have no funds. My relatives who have money aren't giving me money. I cannot get a loan as I defaulted on all my debt when unemployment ended and I simply couldn't pay them anymore. I simply have no way to move. I couldn't live there a day, let alone a month. I've talked to a few companies in Pittsburgh offering jobs and they won't give me an interview until I move where they are. They most certainly don't have any desire to help me.
There are far more than a half dozen cities with a large number of IT jobs. Any city with a population of at least 300k is going to have a lot of IT jobs, and there are over 50 of them in the US. Any of the 10 cities with at least a million population is also going to have a thriving IT job market in its suburbs.
The fact that you said you are more than 100 miles away from a decent IT job market either means you are restricting yourself to San Fransisco, Seattle, etc. or you really do live in the middle of nowhere. You don't need to restrict yourself to the major IT hubs in the US. You could move to Raleigh NC, Nashville TN, Salt Lake City UT, San Antonia TX, Indianapolis IN, or whatever major city is closest to you and find plenty of companies that are hiring in IT.
I live just outside of Erie PA to be bluntly specific. Nearby are Cleveland, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh all roughly 100 miles away. But even those cities only have 3-5 times the jobs of my own region. I wouldn't call that 'thriving' and Pittsburgh and Cleveland are both over 300k. The bulk of IT workers are tied up in places like Seattle, So Cal, and Austin. Those places truly have an 'IT industry' like it tends to be thought of.
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My 'network admin' job was the sole IT person for a charter school with several hundred people. I did the job of a director of technology, a network admin, and a support person all in one. Maybe you should stop being condescending?
My intention was not to be condescending. I was merely pointing out that any advice to move would be bad advice if your experience was not as good as you were letting on. I have helped a few friends improve their careers, and so far everyone who was struggling had very rosy colored glasses when viewing their career. I didn't want to give advice to move to someone who might just not be realistic about how impressive their job history is.
Some of those jobs I really don't have the skills for such as requiring experience in SAP/SME, Sharepoint, Webfocus, SAS, etc which basically require that you've had a job working with those technologies to get them.
The one thing in common with all of my friends with struggling careers w
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I should add that all my friends had college degrees. As someone who didn't get his BS until I was 29 (about 5 years ago) I understand how hard the job market can be without a degree. I got my first job after almost a year of unemployment just by putting that I was 24 credits away from my BS degree on my resume. So there is hope that things will turn around for you once you complete that degree.
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I wouldn't be hired by Google or the others anyways, they prefer fresh young talent and I'm in my mid-30s now.
Let me offer a different perspective. I work in Seattle, one of those hotbeds you mention, but I was recruited here at 30, not right out of school. I think the reason you see the market as stale is that you were a network admin. That role is being automated at a rapid pace. I hope you are studying CS for your bachelors and not "IT". I watch my team struggle every day to find good quality software engineers (not IT admins). We pay well above industry average (50% more), including full relocation costs from a
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I'm not a programmer. You don't want me to be a programmer. I can work with pseudo code and flow charts to describe how things need to be done, but I suck at doing the actual code. I can program, but it's the lesser subset of my skills. My key abilities are in problem solving, planning, and communicating with others.
My bachelors degree is actually 'Business Administration: Management Information Systems'. What I've always done best is analysis and the job I've tried to get over the years are in the systems
I'm going to get on with what I'm doing now... (Score:2)
I think thats the best way for me to deal with this issue right now.
Learn to code already IT people (Score:2)
Non developer positions are having issues.
Finding developers is getting more and more difficult.
Devops is growing.
Maybe time to learn to code and not just click away at control panels?
You are of no value to the company, you're a tool (Score:5, Interesting)
That's all you are, it's all I am and it's all I've been. The drive for the bottom dollar has gotten even more intense in the last decade than ever. Managers, CEO's CTO's, shareholders, taxpayers, regardless - the primary focus is money.
The ONLY IT workers they give e a shit about are the well dressed, smart talking (and genuinely smart) guys who waltz in consulting on how to reduce costs. (ie: you MAKE them money, you're income, not expense!) If you can charge a business 700 to 1500 a day for 6 to 18 months, but in the end of your project they get to fire 3/4 of a team of 100 people then you're _exactly_ what they're after.
I write this unfortunately as a primary support person over the years, maybe due to lazyness, apathy, people skills, depression, personality? Who knows - but I never became a creator always a supporter. I fixed things but I never designed stuff, so now things are breaking less and less, things are finally being designed exceptionally well. Plus there's ways to minimise the impact if things do break. At least in the support area, you are fucked, be it level 1 2 or 3.
They do still need some support people but less and those people generally already have their jobs. So, if you know how to replace systems, "send shit to the cloud" - you're in, save carefully though, because eventually every business will be "on the cloud" and your consulting gig, moving people to the cloud will dry up too.
This is just how IT has gone, let alone the impact of the shitty financial industry and governments fucking up the economy(ies) internationally, gloablisation means move shit to where it's cheapest - and a lot more shit can be moved easier now. We had a good run on the gravy train but that shit is finished now.
I'm estimating a 35 -> 45% pay drop from the job I've just been given the heave ho-from to my next one (assuming I'm lucky enough, I'm hearing an average of 200 applicants per job in my city) I should've damn well become a plumber or electrician. YEah they need to re-train now and then too but you sure as shit can't outsource it to XYZ country.
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If this is accurate, then it sounds like your former employer was massively overpaying you and was smart to let you go. They can hire a new you for 35-40% less.
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Your post is redundant, when it's a hirer's market at the moment. Very very few jobs can you leave one and get the same pay. Not when there's 200 applicants per job. Wages are in freefall over here (AU)
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The GP poster was probably not being overpaid. It's just that in the current market and the high applicant/open-positions ratio, employers can low-ball on salary and desperate, unemployed IT folks will accept any offer.
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What was moronic about it? The poster claimed he will only be able to command 35-40% of his previous salary when he finds a new job. Presumably his productivity will stay roughly constant, assuming he stays in the same industry. So the "market value" of all that he brings to the table is actually 35-40% of what his previous employer was paying him. Ergo his previous employer was overpaying him. If I can buy an identical car from two d
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Get into security. Sure, they COULD outsource this... but rest assured your management will be paranoid enough not to.
like politics... (Score:2)
At the moment, for my specific skill set and in the specific area where I live, the job
Fragmented market (Score:3)
The market slumps because there's a whole lot of people that show experience companies do not want.
My project at a huge company just finished, so I started looking for another one: I interviewed in six places, got six offers in two weeks, 2 paying as much as my old job, 4 paying from 10 to 20% more. 4 were from companies in town, 2 were bay area companies asking for telecomutting. The salary that pays for an OK experienced programmer in the bay pays more than an architect makes in the midwest, and it's hard to hire in the bay if you are not a big name, so companies are starting to look outside for quality candidates.
But that's the thing, an applicant need a resume proving that you learn new skills quickly, and that he is working on tools that are growing in adoption, like languages with functional programming elements. The cost of a bad hire is just very high, it's just too risky to get someone that has a good probability of not working out.
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It's all about outsourcing for less $$$ (Score:3)
Companies are outsourcing to India for dimes on the dollar.
That's what my company is doing. They have basically told us we won't be doing any in house development. My COO flat out told me they were going to using people from India because they can pay them a dime on the dollar. The whole line of people who are in any kind of development track all will have to take a "skills assessment" to see where their skills might best fit them elsewhere in the organization. All DBA and server administration work is being transferred as well. Guess what NO IT job is safe these days.... IT -IS- a dying field in the U.S. unless you want to work for dimes on the dollar... Maybe those striking fast food workers will find themselves outsourced by Indians as well.
They call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it!
Self Serve IT (Score:2)
I was talking to a young, bright FBI agent last month and when I said that I was a software developer she said quite appropriately "aren't we all?"
I'm afraid that IT is becoming very much self serve and the few remaining Development/IT jobs are going to be very specialized and hardcore positions.
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RAD tools mean that everyone can kinda-sorta slap together a few lines of code (or at least pull an object here, tug another one there and draw a line between them to "do stuff").
And if your security managers enjoy sitting on an ejector seat, you might even get it approved as a good idea.
the light is an oncoming train (Score:2)
IT Hiring is fucked permanently because we are susceptible to the fraudulent belief that Indian programmers are as good as their American counterparts. This ignorance pervades corporate IT hiring, whereupon outsourcing looks pretty cheap when compared to hiring a competent American. Alas, they fail to consider the risks because IT is an EXPENSE, not an INVESTMENT. #idiots
Want more IT jobs? (Score:3)
Want more IT jobs, make it hard work again:
- Bring back Windows NT.
- Make HDD's fail more
- Make network unstable
- Ensure PC hardware constantly fails
Its common sense, the issue is:
- Hardware has got more stable and reliable.
- Software has got alot easier to manage, mostly automated and alot more stable 24/7.
- Anyone can do it.
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...or the standards of computer science education in Western countries could improve? We could start with insisting all CS students learn a close-to-the-metal language like C, and not graduating JavaScript specialists.
Re:bringing in more H1Bs will solve this problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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And how many jobs actually require you to get "close to the metal"?
The important ones. Like, developing software for control units in vehicles.
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Re:bringing in more H1Bs will solve this problem (Score:4, Interesting)
I think you underestimate the market for engine control, exhaust aftertreatment and safety systems.
Re:bringing in more H1Bs will solve this problem (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you underestimate the market for engine control, exhaust aftertreatment and safety systems.
I think you overestimate how much of that requires "close to the metal" programming. A few embedded engineers can write all the gnarly C code, with volatile pointers, etc., to interface with the hardware, and then wrap it up in a library that can be used by other programmers writing the high level code. Most programmers will never need to read a thermistor or use PWM to set a voltage.
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If that's the case we should all go and learn Scada because of, you know, nuclear plants and that sort of stuff which are more important to me than a stupid car that can't drive in heavy rain.
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http://developers.slashdot.org... [slashdot.org]
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iirc Automotive Linux [ http://automotive.linuxfoundat... [linuxfoundation.org] ] is HTML5/Javascript on the frontend...
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I'm talking about this stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... [wikipedia.org]
Re:bringing in more H1Bs will solve this problem (Score:5, Funny)
Well, it would make my job so much easier. It's kinda hard to explain to someone who has no idea what he's doing (i.e. someone who never saw ASM or C) why buffer overflows are BAD, why (and most of all how!) to avoid them.
Security would be a much easier job if "programmers" (I'll use the term very loosely here now) didn't stare blankly at you if you tried to tell them that garbage collection isn't just the term I use for the bus that takes them back home from work.
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Since assembly or C (or C++ for that matter) are the main languages used today that can give you buffer overflow if used incorrectly, why are people letting programmers who have "never seen them before" work in these languages? It would seem a modicum of training might be needed to fill in the gap. Shouldn't employers who are worried about such things provide training in these areas if they need it? Oh, I see... It's all the contrac... uh, I mean employee's responsibility.
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And how many jobs actually require you to get "close to the metal"?
That's the wrong question.
The real question is "How many jobs need you to understand what the metal does when you write code in order for you to be any good". The answer is "almost all of them".
Sure, there are rapid application development (RAD) environments that allow you to create a TCP server in three lines of code with a scale out of 5,000..... assuming you don't actually want to do anything with each connecting client. If you do, the scale out suddenly drops to 5 unless you know what you're doing.
And h
GIst of the problem is ... (Score:5, Insightful)
... the economy of US is not booming
No matter if one can write high level code or whatnots, it still gonna be linked to the economy
People do not hire IT workers just because they have too much money - people hire IT workers because their companies have IT problems to be solved
And ... this is the kicker ... when the economy is not expanding, companies don't see their profit jumps, and when that happen, they will start looking for ways to save money, and one way to save money is to NOT hiring
The spending power of the people inside the U. S. of A. ain't booming - plus, the US exports also not growing leaps and bounds either
Face it, the economy of the United States of America hasn't been in too great a shape since the 1990's, and the future sure ain't look so bright
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Well, not hiring means fewer people who have money, fewer people with money means less spending, which in turn means companies not doing well, which in turn leads to them not hiring.
We need people with money to spend. That's basically the problem.
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Are you high?
Businesses don't hire out of the goodness of their heart. Hiring is the necessary evil to get someone to work for you. Businesses making more money don't lead to more hiring. It leads to higher profit for the business. Nothing else.
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It does when they need those people to make more money. If I own a store, and am making good money, I might want to expand and open new stores so I can make even more money. Those stores won't run themselves.
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True, but you will not simply hire more people just because your profits are higher. You'd only want to hire more people if you could sell more. To sell more, though, you'd first of all need more people willing and able to buy. And that in turn requires people to have money to spend!
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Why then do you think the business has any employees in the first place. Think of the profits if they hired no one at all! It would all be profit!
Meanwhile, on this planet, to do more business you need more employees. You don't want to hire more people if you fear an upturn is temporary and you'll just have to lay them off again, but that means your business isn't expanding like it could. The lass risk adverse companies hire early on when the economy starts to grow, and over time more and more companies
Re:bringing in more H1Bs will solve this problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, a lot more employers are demanding quick-and-dirty JavaScript-style solutions than rigorous close-to-the-metal C solutions.
Because getting a pretty UI up in a hurry makes it look "done", but making something with quality takes time without "doing anything" that PHBs and users can see.
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What employers demand should not dictate what universities teach.
Otherwise we are quite literally giving a bunch of people McDonald's certifications and telling them that's an education.
Re:bringing in more H1Bs will solve this problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The age-old fallacy that what specifics you teach people has any correlation to their future careers.
If you're a programmer, the language does not matter. It's literally that simple. You could WRITE your own language if it came to it.
If you're not, learning some language that's a passing fad is hardly worth worrying about compared to one that went out with the Ark.
In the same way that all my science classes taught me that Pluto was a planet, all my CS classes taught me about languages from the 60's that aren't in use any more. Literally, by the time you get to the workplace the language does not matter. It's like a car mechanic who's repaired some Fords in the past... it won't help him much on the new Fords or on other models if he can't use the underlying skills instead of the rote teaching.
Course languages should not be chosen to suit employers who - generally speaking - by the time those students graduate will be demanding something else. They should be chosen to promote understanding and completeness and practicality (I'm not saying we should all teach a language that doesn't exist outside of academia, for example). Just for the simple matter of students being able to obtain a compiler and get to grips with it at home, if nothing else.
But saying that business should dictate the languages taught is nonsensical. Things used in business are generally a BAD IDEA. We know they are. Because they are quick, cheap and dirty. That shouldn't be the basis of an education, especially when - as you hint at - it's the theory that matters.
For the record, I have been "officially" taught BBC BASIC, Visual Basic 3.0 and Java. And I have a degree in CS. Only one of those is close to a useful language any more, and that's the one being ridiculed in the previous article for it's use in the world's most popular brand of smartphones nowadays. If anything keeps me in a job, it's C, SQL, and the ability to quickly read example code from any language (PHP, Ruby, Perl, VB, C#, you name it) and knock up something that works by knowing that they are all pretty much the same at the bottom.
Course languages have almost zero correlation to future success. Business is already suspicious of people who do a 3-year CS degree and then tell you they can program anything in Java. It honestly doesn't matter what the language is, so business shouldn't be dictating it.
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Almost, but not quite.
Fad languages exist and in the short term they matter. No-one has quite found the right solution for websites, for example, and thus new 'improved' languages/platforms/whatever keep appearing. All of these are fads, but websites exists, and website developers have jobs.
Think of pure maths versus applied maths.
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No-one has quite found the right solution for websites...
And they never will until folks get it through their heads that, separation of concerns notwithstanding, needing to learn more than two or three disparate languages to make any software system is a bad idea. Just because the concerns are separated doesn't mean syntax and computational models need to be. Right now, to write a reasonable web page, you need to know HTML, CSS, and Javascript at a minimum. Take that all the way to the backend and you're p
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I'd like to push back against this. I'll agree that the specifics of what one learns in university, assuming we're talking about someone who got a Math/Physics/CS/Engineering degree, likely aren't predictive of long-term career success. That said, subject matter can be decently predictive in terms of short-term success. If I'm looking to hire a junior
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That's an age-old fallacy? A CS degree isn't supposed to train you in specific languages. It is about understanding concepts that you can apply to any language. It is up to the individual to apply those concepts in learning new languages.
The real problem is when an employer doesn't see language X on your resume. It doesn't matter that I have 20 years of experience and have picked up multiple languages as needed for a job, it puts you behind the 8 ball. It is sometimes tough to convince people you can
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Actually, compiler theory is a great example of a language you can't easily learn in any language. The small lightweight structures it generates, and the referentially transparent transformations that you run those structures through lend it strongly to being done with functional languages, and if not, very close to the metal languages like C. Heavy weight OO languages tend to end up just causing you to write 3 tons of boiler plate, rather than actually learning the theory.
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They don't want H1-Bs for better education (Score:3)
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WHy do you think H1Bs are cheaprer? Because you heard that once? All H1B salaries are public knowledge. At every large company I worked with, there'd be at least one of the engineers who would ferret out the salaries of all the H1Bs on the team. Guess what? They were paid competitively (salaries were lower by about what you'd expect for the legal costs involved in sponsorship).
Are there illegal H1B shops exploiting young workers? Sure there are. Bet they still get paid better then the $18k I started
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and they should also get off your lawn.
PS I'm older than you.
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Programming is only a tool to learn other concepts which are basics of the CS/Software Engineering curricula, like algorithms, data structures and much more stuff which are not programming. If what you want is to learn programming, study something else.
Re: bringing in more H1Bs will solve this problem (Score:2, Interesting)
Was that a joke? Bring in more H1B visa workers?
I work for a very large corporation that has more than 10k Indian workers in our Indian office. We have systematically replaced standard IT workers with Indian contractors for years. They receive no real benefits and are clock launchers in many cases. If you give them a list of things to do they generally can accomplish them but do not go the extra step to collaborate and work to common goals because frankly they don't share common goals. The best paralle
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Could you please point out the benefit for US American programmers of a job they don't get hired for being in the US compared to a job they can't get hired for abroad?
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Sadly this is pretty accurate (Score:2)
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The next rising tide will come with the next economic system, at least in the West. Capitalism was the system of Industrial Age, and is defunct now that everything's getting automated (except in countries that a still industrializing), since ordinary folks no longer have ways to tap into it for reasonable income.
I wonder what the Information Age economic system will be called, and what equivalent to Communism will its inevitable abuses spawn?
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Re:Why buy American? (Score:5, Insightful)
there are always people in third world countries who will do the same work as you for peanuts.
I remember spending hours untangling Bangalore Spaghetti Code. One application used a 2,000 character url string that passed the administrator user name and password in plain text. Cheaper does not mean better. People over there can work for peanuts because they live in cardboard ghettos. Maybe we want our people to have indoor sanitation, running water and electricity.
Maybe we should be considering trade barriers instead of feeling like we need to compete with starvation wages in every third world hell hole on the planet.
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I think in the business context cheaper is almost always "better". I've dealt with reams of horrible code also, but at the end of the day most people just want a product that looks like it works. They don't have the technical experience to determine whether it was well built or not, just how it behaves on the surface under ideal conditions.
Programming as a profession is getting priced out. First they came for Support, then IT, etc. DevOps will eventually fall to the wayside of automation which is the whole
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Yes but remember that programming is mostly about eliminating other jobs. So it does have a cannibalizing effect but in general everybody else has it much worse.
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Whatever else you think they're not inferior to you. Stop thinking that. It plays into the hands of the b
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The biggest problem is the damn forced-use of applicant tracking systems when applying for a position with an organization. Your resume has a sufficiently close to zero probability of ever being read by a human being. And there is the proverbial purple squirrel that every laundry list of requirements seems to seek yet never find (unless they only can be found in India).
I work for a large US corp. We use an applicant tracking system. Hiring managers and internal recruiters scour it constantly looking for that one overlooked resume that the other guys might have missed. But mostly it's about LinkedIn these days: my manager sends maybe 100 emails a week to people hoping to find anyone actually looking for work. We have reqs we can't seem to fill, IMO because developers with established careers haven't figured out yet that opportunity is knocking again.
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I'm a Rubyist and have done Rails too, although my experience especially for the last two years is mostly in other areas.
Will I get a big check to move to Australia? If so, we should talk :)
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I'm a Rubyist and have done Rails too, although my experience especially for the last two years is mostly in other areas.
Will I get a big check to move to Australia? If so, we should talk :)
The points-based immigration system that Australia and New Zealand use strongly favors educated American couples in the late 20s. If you graduated from an American university, have a spouse that also graduated from an American university, have 5 or more years of job experience and are less than 30 years old, you will probably have enough points to get an automatic permanent visa. But... You'll get a high standard of living but you'll also have a high cost of living. You'll find it difficult to save mone
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In the US too. I didn't read the article, but it would seem like they don't include developers in their "IT job" stats.
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What have _you_ done - where is your Git...
What meetup groups do you attend regularly...
Why does your linkedin endorsements are knitting and you have no tech endorsements
Github, Meetup, and LinkedIn. So you want to hire people that spend all their time doing social networking, or people that actually work during work hours and have hobbies in their non work hours? I work in a smallish shop - only about 22 developers out of 70 total employees. The best developers we have are basically unemployable by your standards. At best they might have a LinkedIn page that hasn't been updated in 3 years.
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Pretty much this. A good deal of the people working here are ... let's put it nicely ... socially inapt to the point of socially nonexistent. To force an old joke, the extroverted people here are the ones that look at your shoes when talking to you.
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Wait, are you hiring for marketing or engineering? It sounds like the former. You're looking for someone who spends more time tooting his own horn than actually doing something.
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If you're paying peanuts, be prepared to get monkeys.
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For good security guys with some reasonable certs you can easily consider 150 "entry level" for the bidding war. If you can get him for less than 150, consider something highly suspicious.
Good people are still very, very rare. To quote an ex boss of mine "good, available, no police record - pick two".
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Yeah, because the other sock puppet would've made all the difference.