We need skills but will not pay more than minimum wage.
Must be an MD with admitting privileges at 37 hospitals.
Yes, this ad is being placed so we can check off the “Tried to find local” on the H1B (“Green Card” in earlier times).
I was working for a contract house, and happened to see its “Standing Recruitment Advertisement” - it was on the back of the break room door - a door that was always propped open against the wall.
This was 1981 - when they were importing Brits and South Africans (we got one real winner - Apartheid explained and defended in a room with blacks and Asians*).
Now that India has upped their educational system (both programming languages AND English!), they can get even cheaper labor.
Throw in instant communications to simply any backwater locations, and there is no reason to pay $80K to get an app written.
he was gone in approx. 10 minutes and was never seen again. This was SF, of all places to spout off that crap.
I disagree with this. Cheaper products are mass manufactured on automated assembly lines. When a factory is automated, you only have one worker for every five (or however many) machines that each pumps out 100 units/minute. So the workers you have need to be more highly educated or at least trained to support/maintain/clean the machines, but you don’t need very many of them.
Automation has also (by the way) eliminated many ITS jobs. There are giant data warehouses now, running thousands of servers, all in “lights out” operation. A very few sysadmins can log in remotely to manage a thousand servers each. I happen to live in an area that’s rapidly becoming the New Silicon Valley with enormousdata warehouse facilities being built everywhere you look. If you look at all the huge buildings and get excited about all the new jobs they’ll bring, you need to think again.
This. I’ve applied to a few jobs because they sounded interesting. I would have been happy to be trained, but almost nobody is willing to do that. When companies complain about not being able to find “qualified” workers, what they really mean is “We’re too lazy and stupid to train workers ourselves.”
Another bit of hand-wringing is sometimes heard - the USA no longer knows how to…
At one time, it was “Make Li-ion batteries”. Whatever else Musk and Tesla do or do not do, the Gigafactory now has (Panasonic) robots to make Li-ion batteries for the Tesla battery packs.
The upside of robotics: any place with enough electricity and money can buy just about any technology.
Except: Back when “Everybody! Move all your manufacturing work to China - the cost of the factory will be recouped in the first year from labor savings!” was current, Cummins Engine proudly stated that all the work was in China, except for drilling the injectors - those pricks at State won’t let us ship that technology to China, just because they’re Commies.
I noticed they are now bragging about all the jobs they provide for Good Americans!.
That has nothing to do with drug testing employees and you know it. Drug tests don’t find out whether you are high. They find out whether you have ever been high. At least in the past month or two. It’s the equivalent of being fired (or not getting hired) in November because you drank a beer once over the summer, and everyone saying “could you imagine if they let drunk people work there!?” It’s a complete non-sequitur.
Do you really need to know if a guy smoked weed a couple of weekends ago, though? Surely anyone who ISN’T high can tell if Ted shows up baked?
Canada doesn’t have widespread drug testing and we don’t have an epidemic of druggies causing workplace accidents.
But yes, the skill gap is there. You can advertise welding jobs in some places for $50,000 a year to start, and get no, or very few, qualified applicants.
How often are these drug tests done? Shouldn’t you have some reason to suspect someone is high before you test them?
I don’t think cops pull over random motorists and make them breathe into a tube, I think they pull over people who are driving badly and who they suspect were impaired by something.
At my employer they’ll only drug test you if you have an accident, or are demonstrating extremely obvious intoxication.
Other companies will drug test the lower ranks on a regular schedule regardless of behavior. This is perfectly legal in the US, and failure to comply with such testing means you will be shown the door.
Tell me about it. They have a long list of skills and won’t touch you if you don’t fit it but, as you say, they are things that an experienced developer can pick up quickly. Decades of experience with a wide range of languages and tools should win out over someone with a few years of a relatively narrow skill set, even if that skill set is a closer match to their current needs; but that usually isn’t the case. And yes, everyone is looking for contractors or contract to hire.
I’ve been surviving on the odd contract here and there, but they’re hard to come by. Someone who’s looking to hire for only 3 months understandably wants little or no learning curve. Of course the truth is that any new job will have a learning curve because every company and every project is different. Learning a new MVC framework is simple compared to learning that particular company’s code base and way of doing things.
I recently had an interview where I felt confident that I’d probably get the contract. My most recent experience matched exactly what they wanted and the interview seemed to go very well, but they ended up telling the recruiter that they decided to go with an intern! How can you compete with free labor?
Well, some points got skipped over in the simplification. In the end, lower-grade products are easier to make in automated facilities, and that’s just what happened. I was talking more about the first step down, from high quality to a lowering of quality that permits faster, simpler production from the same facilities, at the cost of product durability and lifespan. It’s all downhill from there on both fronts.
I’d like to see some hard numbers for wages. If an employer is complaining about a shortage, but only pays median wages for a given education and experience level, I call bullshit.
A real skill shortage should cause some serious wage hikes. I recall hearing about freshly minted geologists getting competing six figure offers at the beginning of the last oil boom.
What level of experience are people looking for with $50,000 welders? That seems like a pretty high entry level wage for a job with little formal education. But it doesn’t seem anywhere near as impressive for someone with, say, 20 years of experience.
Quoting earnings for the trades can be tricky. In the manufacturing trades, quoting a yearly sum they may be using overtime in the figures. I made a little over $60k one year at a $16/hr job. Sixty hour weeks on third shift wasn’t fun.
In the construction trades, one often hears of princely hourly rates for union electricians, pipeline welders, etc. but they are often idle and won’t make that much in a year.
Three to five years of experience would get you a great salary, but even someone who just has a legit qualification but is relatively new is going to do a hell of a lot better than minimum wage.
There simply aren’t enough welders to go around. It’s a very common refrain, and is true of many trades.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that in the last few years most USA companies have gone a little too crazy in trying to recruit “only the best and brightest”. I’ve heard of companies that let job openings hang unfilled after not finding the best and brightest candidate. My husband even admitted that his company did that once not long ago. It seems that they feel it’s better to let that job go unfilled than to hire someone “average”.
Looking at the scale of the entire business community in the country, it’s a pretty ridiculous expectation. Not ever job requires the smartest/best worker, and not every company requires the smartest/best. But they do this and then go wailing to the media about a “skills gap”.
More than that, companies have gone to hiring for narrower and narrower slots. Someone who has two or three broader, integrated skills is going to get passed over for someone who has a goofy number of years in one niche.
As I’ve discovered, larger employers are completely unimpressed that I’ve been researching, writing, editing, moderating, designing, coding, implementing and maintaining sophisticated websites since the earliest days. I’ve been designing software, equipment and web user interfaces for much longer. That represents one small subset of my overall capabilities. (I sell my services based on the fact that clients need only one person or hire to reach their goal, not four or five who may or may not represent a complete skill set and may not work well together.) Every employer I’ve had was delighted to find out how much I could do for them, even if hired for something as narrow as “technical writer” or “graphics specialist.”
But the big employers here in the northeast want someone who has three years of experience on a fucking wireframe tool that was in beta four years ago, and nothing else. A slot six feet tall and two millimeters square, to fit with 800 other such. I’ve been told my wide skill set is a detriment to these companies’ employment scheme.
I’m not in software, but can’t you lie about this? Clearly you’re smart enough to come up to speed on this wireframe tool in about a day or two, so why can’t you just cram before the job interview?
I guess you’d have to have references who will cover for you, unless you claim all your experience was personal, or gained while you were self-employed. And sometimes those tools are proprietary and obscenely expensive for an unemployed person. I get that.
But a lot of it isn’t. If some ignorant hiring manager wants six years’ experience with Clojurescript or another trendy language, but doesn’t realize any programmer worth anything could learn that in a week or two, you don’t have to tell them you’ve only been using it for a week or two, right?
“Oh yeah, Clojurescript. I remember all those late nights I spent helping so-and-so when he was creating it.”
It is relatively easy for an experienced programmer to learn the basics of a new language, but that’s not the same thing as being proficient. Every language will have it’s tricks and pitfalls. It’s the years of experience with a language that makes the difference between someone who can write simple programs to do a trivial task and someone who can write customer-ready programs which can tackle complex tasks in a reliable and robust manner.
An example might be someone who is good with spoken languages learning a new one. They may be able to get quickly up to speed in the basic structure and vocabulary of the language, but it will take a while before they can have complex, nuanced conversations with native speakers.
An experienced programmer will be able to quickly get to the point of fluency in the new programming language, but most employers want them to be product-level proficient in the language on the first day.
I actually saw the writing on the wall with regard to this kind of thing when I was just out of college in 1997, and I saw a job advertisement requesting experience in a language that was longer than the language had actually been available! (it was Java, FTR- they wanted 3 years of experience in Java in early 1998, and it didn’t get released until mid-1995)
Since then, job ads for technical positions are a laundry list of very specific technologies and very specific timeframes which a prospective employee may have one or two of, but not all 5. Or they may have all 5 technologies, but 2-3 years in each, not 5+
I agree with Amateur Barbarian; hiring has become extremely narrowly focused. I attribute it to companies preferring to treat employees as interchangeable parts instead of as assets to be cultivated and nurtured.
After all, why hire someone without the exact experience you want, if you’re not planning on teaching him anything or providing him with a career path in your organization?
So you get companies wailing that they can’t find developers with deep experience in very specific technologies, and then instead of hiring somewhat qualified locals for normal stateside IT pay, they hire barely qualified foreigners for much less money. Because again, if you’re not going to train them or cultivate them, and you can’t find the exact guy you want, you may as well hire the cheapest barely qualified person at that point.
