Once a Dynamo, the Tech Sector Is Slow to Hire
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Quote:
'Corvallis was once a hotbed for tech start-ups. But Ms. Mann said that with layoffs from other tech companies in the area, including Hewlett-Packard, the city now has a glut of people like herself: unemployed engineers with multiple degrees. “I apply for everything I can find, but there are just not that many jobs out there,” she said.'
I used to live near Corvallis (a wonderful area, by the way), and was always struck by how economic development discussions were ONLY focused on how to get a large employer to move to town (both high and low tech). NEVER was there a discussion about how to enable and facilitate "unemployed engineers with multiple degrees" to start making their own damn companies and exporting either goods or services.
It seems to me that entrepeneurship is requires no more special magic power than getting a degree in CS, but we never even consider acculturating a bunch of people to engage in it. Why always job training for somebody else's company? Why not a massive effort to teach people how to do the basic bookeeping and salesmanship to run small to medium size businesses? If 15% of the unemployed engineers in Corvallis could start companies that hired 5 full timers, they would (probably) have a booming economy all over again. Shit, maybe we could start exporting to China (I think they value entrepeneurship and industrialization there...).
Isn't this supposed to be a capitalist nation, for chrissakes? Carnegie didn't wait around for someone to move to his town and give him a job because he had the right training!
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would say that we are all being trained to be docile robots in large institutions that are initiated and controlled by other people who are aware that there is an international class struggle, and they are afraid that we might discover we can do it for ourselves and toss them (and their tax breaks) over.
(Sorry, I just got a little emotional...)
That is pretty much the theory put forward by John Taylor Gatto in "Underground History of American Education"[1] which is actually a pretty interesting book, even if I am not sure I buy everything he talks about.
Oh and unless he faked them, there are too many references from speeches from famous people to just completely ignore him. Which is always the interesting point...
"The first thing we do is kill all the economists and professional educators"
While HN would seem extremely pro - entrepreneurship, in reality, starting your business is not always the smartest move, not from just personal perspective but from perspective of a nation as well. Sure you want Larry Page and Sergey Brin to create Google but before that they went to Stanford for Ph.D. in CS. Entrepreneurship just for sake of it and without any good idea is no better than playing stock market with different strategies.
If 15% of the unemployed engineers in Corvallis could start companies that hired 5 full timers, they would (probably) have a booming economy all over again. Shit, maybe we could start exporting to China (I think they value entrepeneurship and industrialization there...).
The only way to generate income is via means which are non zero sum games [at least non zero sum within that nation].
(I don't mean to be rude, but I think you are criticizing my argument unfairly and unthoughtfully: I never implied all would be roses if you follow my simple plan. You never cite why my success rate is overestimated, though it may be. Your examples are all so extreme as to be non-representative or strawmen.)
While starting a business is both risky and difficult, I think it might be easier with an overall culture that supports it and trains its young people in necessary skills and attitudes (and we don't).
What would they sell? Same things everybody sells -- cat furniture, machine tools, jelly, organic food, printers, cars etc. One doesn't actually need to invent stuff to make it and sell it (for example. ... China)
Did I suggest that they try to sell stuff without researching what a market might need or absorb? (... "playing stock market with different strategies") -- don't accuse me of foolish statements I don't make in order to buttress your non-argument.
How do we address competition? Export, export, export. Is that not obvious? I took it for granted when I wrote the post, sorry if it wasn't. Perhaps competition might be a problem if every single locale in the US did this, but I am always surprised that none seem to be trying; if I were the city council of Corvallis I would be thinking: to hell with the rest of the US, lets sell them stuff they can't make for themselves.
Re skill like Sergey and Larry -- again, it seems obvious that you need a lot of smart people, and that a town like Corvallis has them -- the woman in the article had plenty of education to start something, or work for a local entrepeneur coding the next big social media thing (hehe -- not a good idea really,...)
My thoughts exactly. I see as a politically expedient way to bring local job growth. The city of Portland has spent a lot of time and money, plus a few million kicked in by the state of Oregon, to lure Danish wind-turbine maker Vestas into building their North American headquarters there. As a taxpayer, I'm never sure if we get a good long term ROI on such deals. I think I'd feel better about it if they put that much money into bolstering the state's middling engineering and science university program education or fostering tech incubators.
"Corvallis was once a hotbed for tech start-ups"
Is that true or is it newspaper hyperbole? I graduated from OSU (in Corvallis), but campus life tends to be insular. I know there were some, but "hotbed" seems over the top.
Placing an emphasis on standardized testing is symptomatic of exactly that -- train the intellect and imagination out of the populace... they're easier to control then.
Teachers are rewarded not for what they teach their students, but rather how well their students do on the standardized tests. So now not only are we forcing everyone to abide by the lowest common denominator, we're penalizing teachers who try to do their job, and rewarding the ones that game the system by teaching their students how to take the standardized test.
I don't care if you have a degree. Write a good cover letter, have a resume that isn't all HR keywords spam and actually tells me about your skills, and PUBLISH somewhere. Have a blog that shows me what you're doing and that you can write. Publish some code on Github or contribute to a larger project so I can go look at your work.
Properly because if you simply send the same letter you can send the same to 10 companies in the time it takes to conform to the wishes of one company. And until you are ten times more likely to be hired that way, you are still ahead (unless you are Google, all a large companies are essentially the same, so it doesn't really matter where you get hired).
As for publishing a blog, you are hireing software engineers, not writers. Sure you expect them to be able to write, just as you expect them to be able to speak, but you don't hire speakers either.
Incorrect. 10 times zero is zero. If you don't put any thought into applying for a job, you have next to no chance of getting called in for an interview.
On the other hand, 1 times something is something. If you take the time (measured in minutes) to learn a bit about the company and job in question, and change two sentences on your cover letter to talk about those things, you'll find yourself moved off the big tall stack of "idiot who didn't even bother" resumes and into the tiny little pile of "maybe we should call this guy" ones.
You'll have literally one thousand resumes to sort through, and of those, roughly one thousand are terrible, poorly-written, undirected resumes from unqualified people. You have a few seconds at most to decide if a given resume is worth even reading, and you're in a headspace where you're pretty certain the answer is "no".
In that atmosphere, the chance of me looking at your undirected boilerplate resume with no cover letter and deciding that hey, this guy stands out, is exactly zero.
Try it yourself if you want. Better still, look at all the people who can't find a job in this industry, and the tactics they're using to market themselves. Chances are you'll discover a lot of them using the "send the same resume to every single job posting on monster.com" method that you recommend.
And they're going to stay unemployed until they change.
It is far, far too easy and too tempting for applicants to fire off a resume and cover letter that is ill-aligned for the position, overly generic, rife with mistakes, or a mix of all three. The humans screening these documents are looking for an excuse to EXCLUDE you: spelling, a sense of appreciation for the role and the business, and professionalism are all key here. Look, finding a job is work. The courting process is involved and is much more than just a submission of a resume. A gross rule of thumb: treat finding a new job like finding a life partner. There are steps involved, and care and feeding along the way. However, you'll likely find dividends down the road.
And I'm not mentioning the millions of liberal arts majors who used to be quietly employed but now are finding that many companies simply don't want or need them.
That's why I think the recession and unemployment will persist for a very long time- many of those lost jobs just aren't coming back.
Everyone wants talented developers because companies typically pay them only incrementally more than lousy developers even though they're vastly more productive.
Perhaps the reason people are having trouble finding jobs and companies are having trouble finding people is because both sides are realizing this but companies are still offering the same terms which the talented developers are rejecting either by seeking out the companies offering more pay, the companies offering better projects and teams or by rejecting the system entirely and starting their own companies where they can be the ones that reap the rewards of their efforts rather than the often disproportionately paid executive staff.
Come on. I know the general disdain for liberal arts amongst this crowd, but couldn't you instead pick on, oh I don't know, those who never even went to college or even finished high school? The unemployment rate for those with college degrees _of any kind_ is 4.5%. Among non-degree holders over 9%, and among non-diploma holders over 12%. Yet, you're assuming it's all those philosophy majors that make up the bulk of the unemployed?
Case in point, I'm an English major who has been working for a major mid-sized public software company for over 8 years now making about 40k above the median US household income, not including bonuses or stock options. Believe me when I say I'm not one of the luckier ones, as I have colleagues in the same field (technical publication writing, course developers, or technology journalists) that make US$110000 or more depending on the region and experience level.
Employers look to a degree - _any_ degree - for proof that a candidate has discipline and is a generalist who can adapt to fast-moving actions and targets all under tight deadlines; a person who, through creativity _and_ technical prowess, can solve business problems and work with clients, partners, and fellow associates. That seriously can't _just_ be CS majors. In fact, what makes you think you're safe, if _FTA_ it says you'll have to bring more to the table than just a CS degree with some C++ or Java skills? You're just as vulnerable if you're an average coder than if you're an average desktop support jockey or technical writer.
As for the unemployment rate, you come on. Quoting that 4.5% figure is intellectually dishonest when discussing the value of a degree NOW, in the current economy.
People who were lucky to get a job years before the current recession are mostly doing OK and surviving layoffs,etc.
For RECENT college graduates, the employment picture is far bleaker. The truth is, employers are not hiring at nearly the rate they were before. I've seen the unemployment rate for recent college graduates(aged 22-25) cited at anywhere from 10% to 30%. 80% of college graduates finish school without a job offer in hand.
If it's so easy to get a job with a liberal arts degree, I would love to refer you to dozens of my friends who are desperate for any job at this point and can't find ANYTHING. I'm sure you'll be able to help them out.
As for your friends, I never said it wasn't going to be easy, I just said they'd have a better chance than your claim of lib arts grads being the bulk of the persona non grata in the workforce. There is just WAY too many non degree holders that make up the bulk of the jobless for it to be remotely true.
They're also trying to take advantage of the economic situation to lowball those talented developers -- many of whom are leaving the industry or starting their own companies, or in some cases (like me) both.
Where I am now, we've hired a few folks that the tech team wasn't very keen on, because they were the least useless candidates we could find, not because they're talented.
The media are conveniently ignoring the fact that a surprisingly large fraction of the people who are unable to find tech jobs weren't qualified for them in the first place, and only got hired because the employers were desperate. Unfortunately, the ones who were never qualified in the first place don't know that (or do but refuse to admit it), and the employers can't tell them apart anyway, so everyone ends up getting the short end of the stick.
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.
Nevertheless, many high-tech companies large and small say they are struggling to find highly skilled engineering talent in the United States.
“We are firing up our college recruiting program, enduring all manner of humiliation to try to fill these jobs,” said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, an online brokerage agency for buying and selling homes that is based in Seattle and San Francisco. “I do think we’re still chasing them, not the other way around.”
This was the most interesting part of the article to me. Ruby on Rails is relatively obscure. Scaling web sites is relatively obscure. I bet there is a latency, probably inversely proportional to market size, between when a specialized tech skill is originated and when it has disseminated sufficiently that it can be outsourced.
So, there can be a simultaneous shortage and surplus: a shortage of talented developers working with recent technology, and a surplus of talented (and otherwise) developers who are only familiar with older technology.
... We are firing up our college recruiting program, enduring all manner of humiliation to try to fill these jobs,” said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin"
No disconnect there.
A startup I worked for long ago sold a contract to HP in Corvalis, Oregon. I spent two weeks getting things set up and training the staff. It took an hour to get there from Eugene, which required a 2-connection flight from Boston. I was surprised there was such a huge campus out there where programmers could work. It would have been great to work out there while it lasted. One of the software engineers I worked with had a pretty typical programmer salary and owned a small ranch, horses, an expensive BMW motorcycle, could support 3 kids and a wife who only worked part time, etc.
Unfortunately, I think this sort of situation is rare and a bit risky to your career... if your job disappears there aren't many alternatives unless you move far away.
"The experience of Ms. Mann and others like her suggests that the technology industry may not be the savior of the American job market and a magic bullet for a moribund economy."
Fred Brooks told use quite a while ago that there's no magic bullet.
They don't want to hire 20year experience engineers for $100K
His technique for hiring programmers: (unpaid) probation for 30 days, no exceptions. He almost always confirms sooner than that, but 30 days is the limit for someone who isn't working out.
edit: to stress: I AM NOT recommending this as general business practice.
I should have mentioned that most programmers who look to join are grad student aspirants who want to enter the institute's prestigious PhD program via that route. The alternative to that is the mainstream route which has an entrance exam and a huge amount of competition.
The other thing is that this is a world-class research lab in an area attractive enough to hacker-types that the young people who apply are not too worried about the money. These are of course young folks with no dependents. You get free or cheap housing and food, and access to a wonderful library, etc.
It's about as exploitative as grad school, let's just say. This of course voids any suggestion you might think I made to adopt this as a general business practice.
This puts a serious constraint on the jobs an applicant can try at - even if one is OK with trying out for a job for 30 days without pay, far fewer people can afford to do a few of these in a row and choose the right job for themselves.
IMHO, it is perfectly reasonable to insist that one gets a "try-before-buy" option. Tacking on the "unpaid" factor, sounds like a "While we are at, let us screw them over too" afterthought.
Personally I think most arrangements in academia/higher education are indeed exploitative.
If you try it with people, make certain the employees understand the background, otherwise they might be out the door later -- and you'll have to eat the cost of hiring again.
This might work on me even if I wasn't desperate -- and you e.g. showed me the books:
"This is a startup, we are optimizing for runway right now. If we like you, we will pay you and give you options -- but we must be thrifty for X months."
It's far from a universal technique, but you can tell a lot about someone's sincerity and true skill level by seeing books or blog posts they've written, their open source contribution and projects, their Twitter account, screencasts they've made, citations to talks they've given, and what not.
Geeks cut from all cloths who want more doors to open in future need to keep their digital "footprint" in mind and strive to maintain and build a good image and do great public work.
She assumes that insights from a subset of the tech sector (programming) will hold true for the entire sector. However, she has given me no reason to believe this assumption of hers to be true.
Their supply is limited and controlled, anyone can come and say that they are "web programmer" after reading HTML/CSS/Ruby, Even Universities increase class sizes arbitrarily. All this is not possible in medical profession. Doctors are few, they are trained extensively, not anyone reading anatomy book can go for a residency!
And if anyone ever had any doubt about the veracity of claims that the bar is too low, they have only to spend some time reading the Daily WTF... though I suspect that most people outside of the tech industry would prefer to remain blissfully ignorant and assume that the content at the Daily WTF is the exception, rather than the rule.