Which works great until you get the end product which, due to a lack of effort placed on translating requirements from English to Hindi or Punjabi, does almost but not quite entirely nothing that you expected it to do. But it looked great on the accounting statement.
I stand corrected.
Stranger
Who are these engineers and where do they work? Most places don’t want fresh grads, they want experience. At least 2-5 years, or a master’s degree.
If they wanted fresh grads, I’d probably have a decent job…
I think he meant design by functional decomposition.
Another vote no. I worked 15 years in one place and am on my 11th here.
Most companies do have layoffs from time to time. Someone with only a narrow skill set, especially one no longer needed, is going to be more at risk than someone who is learning all the time. I know that it is easier to go with what you are comfortable with, but it is not good career advice. I’ve read complaints like that cited in the OP, and I suspect a lot of the complainers want to spend their entire careers in one specialty.
As for hiring, lots of companies have special programs and quotas for hiring new college grads. However some only want to hire people with the exact experience needed, and think training is a waste of money. One of these guys was quoted in InfoWorld a while back. Of course these are the same clowns who whine about the shortage of IT talent. My feelings about them are more suited to the Pit.
Depends on the Company and the Management.
I’ve worked places where people with three years of experience are “senior”. They are the places that hire new grads, look for entry-level people, and are constantly re-organizing and/or laying people off to justify the turn-over of more senior (read: more expensive) staff.
Companies that are looking to be bought out or are trying to boost their stock prices for whatever reason usually fall into this category. Run as lean as possible, get rid of the expensive employees, cut expenses however possible. All the better to show a nice shiny balance sheet to potential investors.
Then I’ve been places where if you’ve been there five years, you’re still “the new guy”. They don’t hire people out of school. Heck, they won’t look at anyone without a list of qualifications longer than your arm. Unfortunately, these places are also far more likely to have RIP (Retired In Place) employees who have been there forever, but don’t produce anything; and be The Hell of Odious Procedures.
I was known as the “wicked witch of the Allen Bradley SLC” (or words to that effect). I have actually used my skills a few times in the 17 years since I learned ladder logic.
I’ve seen a lot of programmers come and go and a lot stay around a really long time. The difference was realizing you are in a highly competitive field and you must continue to educate yourself in whatever way you can manage. My last 3 companiues had a really good reimbursement policy for going back to school in a technical field but less than a third of the people I worked with took advantage of it. I work strickly in design now and have a bunch of just out of school types that make about a fourth of my salary doing all the coding. I first started with a 2 year degree in 1973 got another masters in 2005. So far so good.
That’s fairly rare, or even if it’s not rare for the managers, it’s extremely rare for the HR dildoes who see something like “5 years C#”, and stick to it religiously, regardless of things like the guy has 10 years of Visual C++ or something like that.
I’ve always liked to paraphrase Sgt. Zim’s bit about no dangerous weapons, only dangerous men, except in the context of programming languages and programmers. Past a certain level of experience, it’s not the guy’s knowledge of any particular language that’s important, but his experience in solving problems, organizing solutions and doing it well that counts.
Unfortunately, all too often, HR people don’t know how to read between the lines and see that in resumes.
Part of it is that I think there’s still a lot of year-2000/dot-com refugees out there trying to claim they’re programmers, etc… because they were hired in 1998 and worked for 2.5 years as a programmer at a startup, with no experience and 2 junior college programming courses as their qualifications.
The other thing, is that there’s a lot of stuff that is probably confusing to HR people- they don’t know what Java 1 vs. 2 means, or really what IT/development people really do either. So they look for people who meet their cheat-sheet of qualifications.
I worked my way ‘up through the ranks’ in Engineering to Management positions, at a peak being responsibile for a 40 person team. While successful I’ve since moved back over to more individual-contibutor roles as a matter of personal preference.
As a manager, in hiring we usually had requirements for a mix of experience levels; less experienced people (especially recent grads) often worked well under the direction or mentoring of a more senior person. The senior person could off-load some of the tasks they’d done a hundred times to the newcomer who would be learning. When it went well you could have a 1+1=3 situation.
I’ve also been through layoff situations. Deciding who gets laid off can be simplistic (strictly by seniority) or quite complex; a mix of skills (vs what’s needed going forwards), attitude, past performance, and more.
So, to just say Engineers are discarded after 5 years is quite inaccurate and ignores a lot of real factors.
I have met some of those! 
I would say more, but this is a public board…
At the risk of getting out of GQ territory, why would you let HR make these kind of decisions? We define the search terms they use, and refine them until we get a good set. The cost of this is going through a lot of useless resumes to find the few gems. I don’t expect HR to understand the nuances of the acronyms, and the HR people I used to work with didn’t pretend to. A company that lets HR control this process is asking for trouble. Nick of Ask the Headhunter has a lot to say about this subject he is a headhunter with a good on-line column about getting jobs.
I spent my first tour in the Air Force as an energetic and enthusiastic (but totally inexperienced) sidekick to a 30-year analyst. She taught me nearly everything I know about ballistic missiles. Now I’m out of the service and I’ve got almost 8 years experience, and I’m the “senior” guy showing new folks the ropes. I’m in a field that’s probably not far off from Stranger on a Train and we never fire anybody. Likewise, it takes a very convincing undergrad resume to hire someone with no experience.
Another definite no. We (top end European research lab) would take engineers (particularly HV electrical engineers where there is a real shortage) with experience in anything remotely approaching the relevent field over a new graduate/post doc.
This sounds remarkably familiar!
We can’t out-source but we are certainly looking to recruit from India and China - that’s where the numbers are being trained. A few years back the Chinese - who we collaborate with - asked if they could send engineers over to work with us to polish their skills. We agreed - as noted, always need a couple of extra good engineers - then they told us they wanted to send over a hundred as a first batch :smack:
We take on new graduates but even from the top universities we don’t expect too much of them to start with. In fact part of our publically funded mission is to bring on young engineers in areas where Europe has a skills shortage.
I know at least 100 engineers who have graduated from ABET programs and I know of only 2 or 3 that don’t have a job. Those few are hampered by personality traits.
My retired engineer friends have no problem working part time as contractors if they chose to.
Engineering staffing follows a building cycle and worldwide growth is fueling a need for engineers while the US recession is having little effect on dampening the need for engineers in the states due to the retirement of baby-boomer engineers and the need to rebuild the US aging infrastructure built by those boomers (bridges, roads, power systems, wast-water systems).
I can’t speak for programmers but the few I know seem to lose jobs more often but also find new ones fairly quick. In other words they work steady but not at the same location.