Obama Administration Claims There Are 545,000 IT Job Openings 348
dcblogs writes The White House has established a $100 million program that endorses fast-track, boot camp IT training efforts and other four-year degree alternatives. But this plan is drawing criticism because of the underlying message it sends in the H-1B battle. The federal program, called TechHire, will get its money from H-1B visa fees, and the major users of this visa are IT services firms that outsource jobs. Another source of controversy will be the White House's assertion that there are 545,000 unfilled IT jobs. It has not explained how it arrived at this number, but the estimate will likely be used as a talking point by lawmakers seeking to raise the H-1B cap.
if that were true (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:if that were true (Score:5, Funny)
people in the tech sector would not be looking for jobs for months at a time. Id love to see the breakdown on where they came up with this number.
The White House would not lie.
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Show me one president in the last 10 that hasn't been caught in a lie. Maybe carter.
He said he had lusted in his heart; but that was a lie.
Re:if that were true (Score:4, Insightful)
My experience is the people looking for tech jobs now either:
A. Want more money than they are worth (no offense)
B. Are skilled in an area that is saturated (Windows admins)
C. Expect the world to be like the Google Campus (Hipsters)
D. Frankly, aren't worth hiring.
Re:if that were true (Score:5, Insightful)
My experience is that the companies hiring tech workers now either:
A. Want to pay less than people are worth (and therefore want to hire easily exploited foreign workers)
B. Want specific experience with technology that hasn't existed long enough to create it
C. Want to provide crappy working environments with clueless management
D. Frankly, won't be in business very long because they can't adapt.
Re:if that were true (Score:5, Insightful)
B. Want specific experience with technology that hasn't existed long enough to create it
THIS!!
I cant tell you how many job postings I read that said things like you need 5 years experience with X,Y, and Z.... only problem is Y and Z have only been out for 2 years and 4 years respectively.
SOME of that is clueless HR. SOME is to get H1Bs. (Score:5, Informative)
I cant tell you how many job postings I read that said things like you need 5 years experience with X,Y, and Z.... only problem is Y and Z have only been out for 2 years and 4 years respectively.
Some of that is cluelessness in HR departments. (I recall a time where the jobs adds were filled with posts for entry level sysadmins, which demanded enough years of Unix experience that only Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, M. D. McIlroy, and J. F. Ossanna MIGHT qualify. B-) )
But some of it is part of the "hire a cheap H1B" game. By making the requirements impossible (or rejecting all but a handfull of people who already receive astronomical fees on the consulting market), they can claim that "There are no available US citizens quaified for the post." Then they hire an H1B.
Of course the H1B doesn't have the qualifications, either. But his resume is inflated (typically by his recruiting firm, without his knowledge or approval).
The employer knows the game, and isn't expecting the claimed skills to be present - just enough skill to do the actual job. But a citizen who similarly inflated his resume would be in serious trouble as a result.
The boss gets his cheap laborer, the H1B gets his job and visa, the recruiter gets his fee. Everybody is happy except the rejected US candidates.
So who checks for fraud? The boss is happy. The rejected candidates are in no position to investigate or initiate a claim. The government is not interested. (The boss' company is a big political contributor.) Nobody else has standing.
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I don't have IT experience, but you said "tech workers", so I'm going to chime in.
In my experience, our open positions are filled in three ways:
1. We have an internship/co-op program and hire kids who work out well while on co-op.
2. Poach from other tech firms when they lay off or close down.
3. Advertise the position, sift resumes, interview, and hire.
Most - actually, almost all - of our hires come from #1 or #2. The chances of finding a decent person with method #3 is very, very low. You have a lot of peop
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I've gotten all of my jobs as #3, but one company in particular I worked for did primarily #1, and when they had to lay off a few hundred folks, most were supplying #2 pretty quickly.
The key detail is that interview. It seems everybody has that one interview horror story or six, because that's usually the first time a candidate has to actually show that what the employer read on their resume is actually what they provide. Note that I refer to what was read, rather than what was written. You might think your
Re:if that were true (Score:5, Insightful)
A. That works both ways. Jobs are worth what the market says they're worth, too. If you can't hire anybody at a given rate, that is a market signal that you are not offering enough. If you artificially inflate the supply, then claim you're paying "market rates", there's something a bit off there...
B. That is a lame excuse. Train. You're getting a market signal that you're demanding too many skills for too little money. You just don't want to hear what the market is telling you.
Re:if that were true (Score:5, Interesting)
More like train HR to not make unrealistic barriers to getting people interviewed who can do the job
I used to hire people to customize the Oracle eBusiness application stack. I was given a range of $50-60k as a starting salary. I would like for them to have 3-5 years experience (solid on pl/sql, knowledge of the table structure, some familiarity with admin functions, etc...), but anybody with those skill sets was already earning more money
So... I either get absolute liars that HR thinks are a good match, or I interview a ton of people and distinguish which experienced C programmer can make the switch, which recent graduate is willing to put out the effort to learn and which existing functional app user may be able to take on SQL and be successful
HR is the bane of getting hired into IT and Business Management are the vampires who constantly undermine IT wages because they fail to understand where value is being generated in their own company, hell most executives came from sales, so that is where they would rather pay out wages
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At the last place I worked, we had the most awesome HR manager I've ever seen. She was smart as hell, listened to what the managers were saying, and got the hell out of the way when it came to technical evaluations - she hired people she personally didn't like on the basis of the team's recommendations, and they turned out to be good for the company. She knew enough about what we did to know when a resu
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A. That works both ways. Jobs are worth what the market says they're worth, too. If you can't hire anybody at a given rate, that is a market signal that you are not offering enough. If you artificially inflate the supply, then claim you're paying "market rates", there's something a bit off there...
Bargaining between the employer and employee is not only factor in setting market rates. The price customers are willing to play is also part of the equation. If a company will pay $150/hr for ERP consultants but will stick with what they got if the rates are $200/hr, then there is a cap to what employers can pay regardless of how rare qualified applicants are. If they can't find skilled employees at the necessary rates, the work either doesn't get done or it is fully shipped overseas.
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The visa claims are generally that there is a shortage of technical workers, period. It's not a claim that there is shortage of hard-working techies or a shortage of techies with sufficient people skills or a shortage of techies without attitudes, etc. Even IF those were true, it's not the justification the shortage claimers use.
What I see is organizations trying to find an excuse to have more choice without paying a premium for that choice. Whether that's "fair" to citizens or not, is not something they ar
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Great. An H1B shill.
I have witnessed both the "abused talent" and the "scab" myself firsthand. The H1B is a great tool of oppression and it really is used to suppress wages. How could it not? It leaves an employee in a completely vulnerable position.
Companies will cheat if they can. The H1B is just one such cheat that helps undermine a more natural market dynamic.
Re:if that were true (Score:4, Insightful)
Employers are to blame for the mess. It's been an employers' market for years now, and they still aren't satisfied?! Affordable Healthcare relieves them of the burden of handling employee health insurance themselves, but many don't like it. They actually preferred having that as another hold on employees. Be a real shame if you and your whole family lost your health insurance, wouldn't it? You will do what it takes, even if that means putting in 80 hour weeks for the next 6 months, won't you?
On B, it's pretty crappy to put the burden on candidates to train for positions they might not get. Especially when the training wanted is very esoteric. Learning on the job is something many are quite capable of doing, but employers won't even accept that arrangement. Nor will they admit that closely related experience is relevant. Seems the only people companies are willing to train are cheap foreign replacements.
I have to agree on D. It's not startups exactly, it's failing companies. Startups merely experience higher rates of failure. Working on a sinking ship is horrible. As management desperation increases, what fairness and good sense they have vanishes. They began demanding extreme performance, asking for long hours with no extra pay, refusing to see that even if they get it, it won't be enough to save the company. They can turn very abusive. They also look for scapegoats. Soon they're blaming everyone but themselves. They make examples of people, firing some hapless low level employees on trumped up baseless reasons, just in case anyone doesn't get it. You're going to sweat visibly to give 110%, or they will fire you. Then for the grand finale, they don't tell anyone they've run out of money until they can't make payroll, screwing everyone out of a month of pay, and having the nerve to whine that the employees not only shouldn't complain about being cheated, but should feel sorry for them that their glorious vision didn't work out. Their pain is more important! And maybe everyone should keep on working for free in the faint hope that soon fortunes will make a dramatic u-turn and the company will profit enough to pay all the back pay.
Employers also engage in illegal and unfair hiring practices. All this talk of not beimg able to find competent people is simply not true, and is only cover for the real reasons. If they want to, they can always find a reason why someone won't do. And too often, they want to. Often they've already settled on a hire, who can be some incompetent doofus who is related to the boss. They are merely going through the motions of interviewing others, to satisfy the EEOC, knowing that they have no intention of hiring any of them.
Another thing I find hilarious is the recruiter. First those guys are in a big hurry to shove candidates into any job vaguely related to their skills, then once they get a hit, rather than go to bat for their candiadte, they're all over lhe candidate to do the heavy work to win that position. They demand that the candidate heavily alter the resume to the point of outright lies, and say all the right things. Some of the modifications they demand are just plain stupid, but they expect you to shut up and do it if you want a job. The candidates who refuse to cooperate in the mangling of their own resumes are dropped faster than a hot potato, because there are plenty more candidates where they came from.
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Re:if that were true (Score:5, Insightful)
My experience is the people hiring for tech jobs now either:
A. Offer shit pay for crazy hours and expectations.
B. Expect to pay unlivable wages under the guise of 'saturation' and then bitch they need more h1-bs.
C. Expect conformance with hipster ideals/opinions/politics. Hipsters are a pain to manage, but even worse to work for.
D. Frankly, aren't worth working for. This includes things like those manufactured corporate cultures (open offices, chaotic group work sessions designed by people who aren't engineers, buzzword infested behavioral expectations), esp the ones that push particular brands of politics as components.
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Sounds like Startup mentality and I agree with you. I would never work for a startup.
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There is absolutely never an excuse for saying someone wants more than they are worth, you are always wrong, 100% of the time. From janitor, to the CEO with the $500k/yr package and unspecified parachute, if you are in a position where you need to work for a salary, you are almost assuredly selling your skills for far below what you should be making.
The sooner we all just accept this fait accompli, the better our collective lives will be. This also includes standing behind the guy who makes way more than yo
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my background is mixed: I have 25+ years in software (started with C), I do embedded systems, I design and build hardware (some analog, some digital), I have over 20 years in networking (ip, other protocols, switch/router stuff too). techie to the core, have my own hardware lab at home. yes, I do sysadmin as well; started doing linux stuff back in the 1.1 kernel days.
but I'm in the bay area and they really hate 'old guys' like me. I've been on the east coast (moved from boston about 20 years ago) and not
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Re: if that were true (Score:3)
The problem is legions of idiots between you and the hiring manager. They have no understanding of the requirements, just a list of keywords. They would pass over Donald Knuth for software architect because he doesn't have industry experience.
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Re: if that were true (Score:5, Interesting)
Well I have watched the hiring process and even helped HR screen Resumes. I had to fight with them to get them to send them on to the hiring managers. the objection? Falling short of experience in years...by six months, 1 year out of 5 required, etc. At my current employer, local HR selections have to be sent up to corporate IT HR for "review". Perfectly fine candidates are screened out for reasons they won't tell.
Corporate IT DOES have many Indians working for them. You figure it out.
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That makes me want to apply for jobs with Knuth's CV and see how many interviews it gets as an experiment.
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In my experience, there are always candidates out there that can fill the position. The problem is that you and/or your company doesn't want to do what it takes to get such a candidate. That may mean paying relocation costs for someone to move, signing bonuses, or (god forbid) raise the salary. Its pretty clear that the market is tight in your area. That simply means you need to pay more than the company next door...
Or consider that I simply don't want to relocate to your town and fight your traffic and consider the fact that if some low-skilled poor-English person in Bangalore can do the work badly over the Internet that I might be able to do the job better over the Internet.
I cannot live on Indian wages because I don't pay Indian prices on groceries, shelter, and whatever. But I do discount for not having to drive in to work every morning just to do mostly the exact same things I can do from home.
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H. Can't spell "raised".
I. Doesn't start sentences with a capital letter.
Not saying those are deal-breakers, but if I saw a resume with those problems, I would probably pass that person over since they are not detail-oriented enough.
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I'd like to see a salary floor for H1-B at 15 times minimum wage (or 10 times the poverty level, whichever is higher)... + a 20% administrative fee.
That would probably curtail abuses of said system... it couldn't be abused for the purpose of bringing in cheaper labor then.
Re:if that were true (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd like to see a salary floor for H1-B at 15 times minimum wage (or 10 times the poverty level, whichever is higher)... + a 20% administrative fee.
That would probably curtail abuses of said system... it couldn't be abused for the purpose of bringing in cheaper labor then.
I think requiring them to pay prevailing wage to the worker plus put an equal amount into a fund for STEM scholarships would work decent as well.
Even if they fudge the numbers (which they do) and say it's only a 40k position, requiring them to pay an additional 100% premium to a scholarship
fund should minimize the abuse that we're currently seeing.
This could also work for other industries like truck drivers where the complaint is there are not enough drivers when the reality is that there are
plenty of people who would be willing to drive if the pay was higher.
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Yes, like if I can't find a kid to mow my lawn for $10, because he want's $20, then fine. I'll just do it my self for $0, and he can be unemployed.
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Through handouts, the government is in direct conflict with the idea of getting people back to work.
No argument there.
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Not only that, wages would be shooting upwards at unsustainable rates. Not seeing that either.
Re:if that were true (Score:4, Insightful)
Id love to see the breakdown on where they came up with this number.
Being that Obama just pulled that number out of his ass . . . I don't think you would want to see it in any detail.
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His donkey? Heh.
Same with the numbers unemployment numbers.
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Well I am hiring for 1 slot and also an intern... tough to find good help at even high prices so far.
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Easy, calculate the number of position in the area where employers want to pay 50% of their current salaries and they know those existing employees will refuse the massive pay cut. So there are 545,000 positions available that pay 50% of salary of the positions currently filled. There are also a range of military and law enforcement positions, where they pay totally shit wages and conditions are absolutely crap and where they can send you to prison for the minor infractions and failed jock strap douche ba
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If they just count the number of uniq jobs that come to my inbox I think it'd account for a large number of them.
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That's a very strange assertion. It's kinda akin to "if there's half a million jobs out there, why are there people who don't have jobs". The answer is trivial - those people don't have the skills necessary to do those jobs. I can tell you for sure, hiring people who (for example) understand performance critical code, code that requires manual memory management, and code that requires you to think about how you're going to affect cache coherency when you do certain things, is incredibly hard. Add a coup
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Id love to see the breakdown on where they came up with this number.
It includes the 544,000 unfilled positions that require 30 years of Java programming experience.
That number (Score:5, Informative)
That number is EASY to figure out. Just look at all the revolving door jobs the IT industry has created the past few years. The largest companies don't want to high full time anymore, so they just go through temp agencies (*COUGH*MICROSOFT*COUGH*). So, once the temp hits a certain date, they're terminated and replaced by another temp (and the original temp is invited back after a certain period of time). So, with this, we just look at the cycle of temps going in/out of the tech industry. These are the "openings", which are just being filled by the same cycle of people.
545,000 jobs (Score:2)
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there's a local techshop near me (bay area). I have a membership there and its quite a cool hackerspace.
they have openings. guess how much they are willing to pay to be a DC (stupid term, 'dream consultant')? its a staff position where you have some mechanical skills (laser cutters, drills, lathes, CNCs, you name it) and yet you can make more money deliverying pizzas or probably just sitting on unemployment ;(
they are willing to pay less than $15/hour! for someone who has DIY and/or industrial machine s
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How much are people paying for memberships there? What's the rent like in the bay area? Hackerspaces aren't small. How often do they need to fix or replace equipment, what's the power bill like...
Hackerspaces I've seen keep going out of business. Their users just don't pay enough to support higher wage workers. People want a life full of luxuries, but aren't willing to spend enough for those luxuries to keep the creators well paid.
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membership is about $125/mo, fixed price (less if you buy a special, sometimes around holidays).
housing in the bay area is $500k for a broken down POS. not kidding. rent is $2000 for a one bedroom apartment. $2500 for 2 br in many places. insane, huh?
and techshop is probably the most equipped hackerspace in the country. its amazing what they have.
but my point is still this: why are the wages at such a place so low? you can make more changing oil at a gas station!
the bay area is filled with software we
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It doesn't sound like the wages are too low, it sounds like the membership price is ridiculously low. How many memberships are needed just to cover the machines, rent, and leases, and power? Techshop SF has 17,000 square feet. With industrial space in SF going for $2/SF to start, you're talking 272 memberships just to cover the rent. And the list of equipment present - that's another $150,000 per month in leases (or another 1200 memberships). Leases and space alone are 1500 memberships.
You're looking a
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and then get fired for not having a place to properly eat, sleep, and bathe yourself before showing up? Never mind a house, a studio apartment is tough to nearly impossible to maintain at $14 an hour.
Re:545,000 jobs (Score:4, Informative)
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LOLWUT? I could afford my three-bedroom house on minimum wage if I had to. And it's a decent house in a nice neighborhood, too. You need to wise up and GTFO of whatever high cost-of-living shithole you're in, especially if you can't make the high salary to justify it.
There are! (Score:2)
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Dice plug (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, FTFA, they suggest a more realistic number might be in the 60,000s. Anyone who has been in the job market knows that for every unfilled IT job position, there are at least 10 contracting and headhunter firms like Dice vying to fill that job req for their "special client". So it's perfectly reasonable that we could see 10x as many job postings as actual positions available.
And even then, they say that with the inflated numbers, 17% of the IT workforce is unfulfilled. Which actually sounds about right since roughly about a fifth of all of my engineering teams in recent memory have been open job reqs to replace people who just left.
Anyway, contracting and headhunter firms are a big cottage industry grown up around IT nowadays, we're gonna have to hire more developers to make sense of all of this IT hiring data. Like the banks making more money by loaning each other money, we could make the IT job market even bigger by trying to optimize the IT job market! You should use Dice to help you sort through it all!
Dice! (am I doing it right?)
500K listings on renta coder (Score:2)
Change you can believe in! (Score:4, Insightful)
2017 cannot come fast enough. The current administration in the white house does not even know what party it represents, what it stands for.
This is lunacy. There are not 545,000 IT job openings in this country. Look at dice.com, indeed, monster, etc. TRY TO GET A JOB.
I bet there are less than 100,000 real positions available.
This is just a red herring to let them open up the H1-B faucet and drive wages down. This would have been unsurprising coming from the republicans, but from the obama administration? Just more incompetence. Disappointing, but not unexpected.
Re:Change you can believe in! (Score:4, Insightful)
2017 cannot come fast enough.
You don't actually believe this will change anything, do you?
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It always and only gets worse.
This is realism disguised as cynicism. We have the same situation in my own country.
Every English-speaking nation is suffering the same problem: those in power are terrible, those opposed are atrocious.
Perhaps it has always been this way but it has never been more visible.
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no more HealthCare if you have a preexisting conditions. The ER will see you now.
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2017 cannot come fast enough.
You don't actually believe this will change anything, do you?
Why not? 2008/9 sure changed a lot.
Oh wait, that's right; there was some fabulous advance in robotics right then. Or something. That's it.
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There are not 545,000 IT job openings in this country.
not that i am disagreeing with the skepticism here, but do you have hard data establishing this to not be true? because all the griping here about the number not being realistic means bupkus without actual, hard data.
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There are two camps out here apparently. In one camp, workers are paid and treated terribly if they're lucky enough to get a job. In the other camp, workers are getting decent offers and pay. If there's a split, as much as I can see it, the IT jobs such as network and system administration are legitimately not opening up and paying as well as they did. The software jobs are becoming more challenging, but mostly paying well.
What I'm trying to figure out is whether there are significant numbers of happily em
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If you think the other party is anti-imported-labor, you will be in for a second surprise. Both parties do it because the Plutocrats pay them to, and not enough voters know or care about the issue to override the influence of legalized bribery.
The available election choices kind of remind me of our family's ISP choices: Company A offers spotty connections and Company B keeps putting bogus "fees" on our bill, like insurance we never asked for. Compa
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I'm not sure that would do anything. Obama has shown that a President can get away with simply ignoring the law.
Here's one (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Here's one (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Here's one (Score:5, Insightful)
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You're on crack. Most of that stuff is specialized. Although it shouldn't matter for true professionals. They shouldn't be nearly that rigid. Neither should the corporations that hire them.
The real problem is that corporations think they can treat people like dirt. It's all take and no give. So if someone is not already a custom made perfect fit, they won't be considered.
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6 months Contract to Hire ... Rate: 30/hr on W2
That is what I see all the time as well, and I know they won't get filled.
Market rate is set by both the buyer and the seller. Or in this case, the employer and the employee.
How do I know they will struggle to get the good people?
Because of employers like mine!
We've got similar skill requirements and six month contracts that on the low end START at about $50/hr, with many going for $75/hr, $85/hr, or more. That's what we pay to get skilled people. Many apply, there are lots of people with documented suc
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I recommend everyone, especially those with a job, come up with the number you'd leave you job for and respond to every request like this that is a close fit to you with that number.
I did and it eventually worked out really well for me.
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30/hr? Wow! That's fucking laughable, even if cost of living in Nashville was pennies!
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You forgot the part about candidate-financed relocation.
There are! (Score:3)
All at $18.00 an hour or less
He never said the openings were all at honest wages.
Re: There are! (Score:2)
Where the heck? (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought, the 545K number should be easy to substantiate, but googling doesn't find much. Except, an article saying that there are "as much as" 545,000 unfilled IT jobs ... in the UK. Could Obama have been reading the wrong newspaper?
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Could Obama have been reading the wrong newspaper?
Obama says a lot of shit. The basic strategy is to say so much shit that some of it sticks. This works because the media is on his side.
Pulling Numbers out of Your Ass, Explained (Score:2)
Now, I'm an engineer, and sometimes you do have to pull a number out of your ass to make useful estimates in the absence of data. It happens.
But damn, President Obama, we at least try to get the order of magnitude correct!
A half-million IT jobs sitting wide open? I am not an IT professional, but I'd say if there was this much demand for IT, we would need to genuflect at the desk of our IT guy every day at work and thank him for showing up, drunk or otherwise.
Our IT guy actually packs a bag lunch and dr
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IT or STEM? I find that people in government are too dissociated from reality to know the difference. "Who are they? Oh yeah, those boffin people or whatever."
Could be CW made up that figure (Score:3)
Let companies decide how they value experience! (Score:3)
I have my BS in computer science and I've been able to fill the roles of system administrator in multiple OS, storage administrator, network administrator, telecom worker, QA manager, DevOps lead, and programmer. I couldn't do all that if somebody had just fed me the cisco certification path. There is a market for people who did that though.
We should have Vistas for foreign politicians! (Score:2)
I'm sure they could be bought for much less.
Quickest Solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Quick fix: send written* letters with solid facts to his staunchest critics in the other party. They have been very quick and eager to contradict him on other issues. Take advantage of such behavior and motivation.
In particular, Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) have shown skepticism about "techie shortages".
* Paper tends to carry more weight (no pun intended) over email because it takes more effort to prepare, acting as a bit of a riff-raff filter, and thus screening staff pay more attention to it.
Shortage Of (Score:5, Insightful)
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In other words, experienced IT professionals willing to accept post-dotcombust and post-H1B salaries.
Of course there are that many (Score:3)
Given that they are outsourcing all their IT (Score:2)
... the irony of the Obama administration outsourcing the labor to fix the ACA website is all you need to know. At every level of government they're outsourcing their IT.
So I don't really want to hear from the US government on the jobs. They're doing everything in their power to fuck over anyone in the country that doesn't have a staff of lobbyists.
500K openings, 500K unemployable morons (Score:3)
The US has a population of almost 320 million. Between 1% and 2% of the US population has a doctoral degree. Let's use that as a proxy for people with a STEM degree of any kind. That suggests that there's somewhere on the order of 3 million people in the US with a tech degree. If all if them were looking for jobs, then only about 1 in 6 would be able to find one. That being said, I can't tell you how many currently-filled positions there are. This probably accounts for the rest.
Let's keep in mind that most tech degrees aren't worth the paper they're written on. There are universities turning out uneducated graduates in droves. Even the good schools manage to graduate plenty of morons with passing grades. If this weren't the case, then companies like Google wouldn't feel motivated to put interviewees through these grueling, demoralizing, dehumanizing interviews. I don't like that approach to interviews, but it is an effective way of eliminating the huge numbers of college graduates who managed to pass without acquiring any skills. If the colleges had higher standards, this wouldn't be necessary.
People who can't find jobs say there aren't enough openings. Companies with plenty of openings complain that there aren't enough (good) IT graduates. Both are true. There are inordinate numbers of IT graduates. There are also plenty of jobs (open and filled positions combined).
We hear about a lack of IT jobs because the majority of IT graduates can't find jobs. When a majority complains about something, we hear about. What's left out of this is that the majority of IT graduates are also woefully unskilled at IT, although they either don't know or don't care. They spent more energy on cheating than studying, but they (or their parents) paid for their degree, and they feel entitled to get a job. Too bad they're completely unemployable.
Back when I got my bachelors degree, there was a major employer in the area that hired a lot of local graduates. Mostly they would hire them with only a cursory interview. Every single hiree, regardless of skill, was paid $30k/year (this was the mid 90's) and put through an extensive training program. Think of it as 3-month interview or probationary period. If you couldn't hack the training program, you were let go. If you passed, your skill level still didn't matter, because every one was stuck at the bottom of a waterfall design process. All you would do all day, every day was go through a stack of papers, where each paper corresponded to one function or procedure, and you would code them one at a time. Completely mind-numbing. But this company was successful at meeting predictable deadlines by employing thousands of relatively mindless IT graduates. There are still lots of companies like this, and they have to be, because this is the quality of the typical IT graduate. Those companies that adapt to the lowest common denominator do well. People get hired, and they get plenty of employees.
But we're in a super star culture. Companies want super star engineers, and engineers (however unskilled) want super star jobs. And that's where all the complaints (from both sides) are coming from.
Re:Why aren't African-Americans doing these jobs? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm black and I've got a pretty technical job. It's not IT, it's better (to me). I could easily get a low level IT job if I wanted to.
When I was a young teen, I saw a few kids like me but not very many (black OR white). Computers were very much a "nerd" thing. This was about 15 years ago, so I doubt anything has changed. These days it might even be worse, since back then it was a necessary evil, which can now be worked around with tablets and smart phones.
These days, even the most run-down, underfunded inner-city libraries have computers with Internet connectivity, along with books about programming.
I learned Basic in just such a place. The library in a Boys and Girls Club. They didn't have the internet until shortly before I moved on. They had rows of old Apple //e, Macs, and old DOS systems. I was practically their unpaid IT person, fixing all of the things the other kids would break. They even gave me one of those computers my last day there when I moved out of town.
That doesn't answer your question exactly. Suffice it to say, kids don't want to be nerds if they can help it, especially black kids. Oh well. More jobs for me.
Re: (Score:2)
Party Shmarty. All known politicians are spinners. Mr. Carter was probably the closest we had to an honest prez in recent history, and he was booted largely for saying things people didn't want to hear.
Honesty doesn't fly in our system. Voters want to be told they can have their cake AND eat it too. Mention difficult trade-offs, and you are dead meat.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, the number is probably an estimate based on a sample and some assumptions. That's the way these kind of statistics are usually generated. Of course, the sample may not be representative, and the assumptions may be (almost certainly are) wildly optimistic.
I don't believe the number either, but in the name of intellectual honesty, I should mention that head hunters have said recently that in my area at least (pacific northwest) unemployment among IT professionals seeking work is down around 2%. There