Drop in demand for IT professionals

... HR people interviewed me for one post and they thought I didn't have the technical skills. Then another interview, the techie that interviewed me said I didn't have team skills.
The problem sometimes is the interviewee. Most interviewers feed off the responses during the interview, and honestly interviewing technical type people is often painful. I've interviewed some folks that are so withdrawn and "shy" that you literally have to coax everything out of them in detailed question, one word answer fashion. Then you get the bull****ters that just say anything so as to put an answer out there, despite clearly not really knowing what polymorphism is or what database normalisation entails. But finally there's the nervous interviewee who stammers and hits a blank on every question. The technical industry in South Africa is an interesting one. The truly brilliant candidates are usually not willing to blow their own trumpet and often neglect to tell you about their many great achievements, while the average guys are often more creative with their achievements, and tell you over and over and over....

Oddly, most people probably think they don't fall into any of the aforementioned categories. But by my own reckoning, out of the last 80 or so interviews I conducted, I'd say about 70 fit squarely into those.
 
Not quite the same - I have a degree, currently busy with my second one and it's nowhere close. Sure there is some stress in whether you pass or fail - but it's not quite the same as squandering millions of rands of somebody elses money because your cluster script failed. Or having to try and concentrate with a ticked off client breathing behind your neck. Or bringing 500 users to a halt leaving them without a mechanism to work. Or meeting very nearly an impossible deadline.

In the real world your actions have financial and technical implications that affect other people. In university it only affects you.

Yea i understand what you mean. I am working in a bank at the moment, and i have had some real pressure situations, but i have found it quite easy to adapt. Maybe its just me...
 
In addition to competency tests, more relevant questions should be things like:
What were the main projects you've worked on?
What were your biggest challenges? How did you overcome these?
How do you work with other people in a team?
How do you deal with difficult clients?

Then provide a real world problem dealing with both the technical aspects and people, and ask the candidate on how they would approach it.

I was asked all these things while interviewing for my current job. Going to be honest, did do a startup with a few guys from campus so i had quite a few scenarios to refer to.

Junior Question: what is a static method?
Senior Question: What is dependency injection?


I can answer both of those, still don't consider my self anywhere NEAR senior though. I have met some senior developers at work, and some of the stuff they know is pretty intense. I do think that you can only get to that level with experience , but I guess if a company wants 3 to 5 years experience or senior staff they must be willing to pay for it!

With regards to having someone with a formal qualification or not, i think companies feel a little safer going with the qualifications. Some people really feel that qualifications mean nothing and varsity doesn't teach you enough, i completely disagree. 80% of the stuff i manage to do at work is because i did it in varisty. Before varsity i never realized that there are so many ways to improve a solution with using small things. I mean even just choosing the right data structures for example makes such a big difference and varisty the reason why i know these data structures...
 
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Sounds like you dev guys are having a bit of a rough time at the moment. I can tell you from experience as an employer. A developer with a degree and anything less than 3 years experience is a liability. Although they have the theory and can write code, me as en employer, I have to invest (money & time) in the person before they are really an asset. I know some of you are going to want to flame me for that but I'm talking from my experience.

A developer with 10 years experience is a real asset. Also comes with a REAL price tag. My advice is take whatever job you can. Do a good job and don't complain. If you are really as good as you think your salary will not only catch up to the other "senior" devs but it will go way past. If it doesn't with that employer then thank them for the experience and move on. Now you have your degree AND experience.
 
The truly brilliant candidates are usually not willing to blow their own trumpet and often neglect to tell you about their many great achievements, while the average guys are often more creative with their achievements, and tell you over and over and over....


+1

The average joe is to stupid to recognise a genius :D
 
Seniors vs Juniors

A developer with a degree and anything less than 3 years experience is a liability. Although they have the theory and can write code, me as en employer, I have to invest (money & time) in the person before they are really an asset. I know some of you are going to want to flame me for that but I'm talking from my experience.

I would take a bright candidate with less than 3 years experience before I take a senior developer with a bad attitude. We've made the mistake of getting "senior" contractors that are nothing but "copy and paste" coders. We're still cleaning up the some senior developers bad code that has infiltrated the most obscure places. Seniors know how to skirt the system. Juniors are sponges that want to learn and are full of energy.

I won't deny that senior developers have a lot to offer with their experience, but get yourself a bad one (at least 7 in 10 are bad) and you'll wish you could find a teachable junior.

Juniors are keen to learn and will take a much lower salary to start off with.

But as you say, we are all talking from our own different experiences, so in that is a lesson to be learned.
 
I work in the aviation industry , and i am in charge of our SA datacenter. I tell you when the **** hits the fan then you will know the diffirence between a decent tech and a brilliant one.
 
feature creep --had to deal with this
budget issues --and this
changing deadlines --definitely this :eek:
staff turnover -didn't deal with this
crappy management --does sh*tty lecturer count? (insisting things be done a certain way, no open source, making us change the design a few times, etc) :mad:
angry clients --didn't have to deal with this
bad requirements elicitation --had to deal with this too :(

Sure, but this doesn't take into account the fact that the CIO doesn't want the project, the project manager doesn't know the project and the project owner is stressed beyond belief trying to keep a straight face while he looks down every time you tell him that 'some unforseen requirement' will impact the project. "The unforseen requirement is something that is due to a legacy system you are interfacing with" you say, but he doesn't understand the jargon. While doing all of this, you have to maintain a system written by a developer who went job hopping and left his last project stranded against a brick wall, you need to attend daily update meetings where a task team questions various aspects of outstanding issues and the test team are complaining that you are not giving them enough of your time for them to work through their iterations. To top this, the crappy McAfee anti virus that the company force-installs on your PC is disalowing some socket connections and direct disk write access and you are not allowed to bypass it without proper authorization. You would have looked at this already, but because the IT Updates are busy installing on your PC, you are unable to use your PC for another 23 minutes. Incidently, the next bug meeting is 15 minutes from now and you are still unable to print a list of your changes because of the update.

..and that's just an everage daily snapshot. Still to come, your wife wants you to take friday off, you were a little late this morning because there was a stationary truck at the Allandale offramp and you have to leave early today because you have a parents evening at school.

Then, just as you are about to leave your phone rings and the operations guy on the other end of the line lets you know that they upgraded 'Data 1' from .NET 1.1 to .NET 3.5 and now remoting calls from 'Legacy 1' to 'Data 1' are failing with 'internal server errors'

It's all in a day's work really :)
 
I work in virtualisation specifically and having spent 4 years in the UK certainly helped me find work in SA. My feeling is that we have this strange sense in SA that IT means being a techie, which is a rather backward viewpoint. These days, IT professionals have to be more than having an MCSE and knowing what a network point is. It's working with finances, systems, people and probably lastly computers. The sooner we realise that IT professionals are just that - professional - the better.
 
Some are good.

I have read something now that nobody could tell me, a glimps of what goes on at a developers work group if you will. Thanks for some links to what I should look for and I'll take it from there. It does sound like there are reasonable people willing to dig in and see what that person can do. I wish we all had some of the interviewers like kingmonty.
 
As a developer [with +30 years experience] I was recently asked to conduct the technical interviews for the candidates applying for the position of senior developer.

Being well aware of the weaknesses of the 'normal' interview :) I decided to adopt a slightly different approach, e.g.:

1. What books on development have you purchased since leaving University? Which is your favourite? Why?
2. Which blogs / newsletters do you read on a regular basis?
3. Do you / have you used test-driven development? Continuous integration? Version control?
4. Do you / have you used FxCop / StyleCop / similar?
5. Do you / have you used patterns?


The underlying reasoning (obviously open to debate) was simple:

1. A person who purchases books / pays for his/her own traing courses is serious about self-improvement.
2. A person reading blogs tends to want to keep abreast of current / new trends.
3. The balance of the questions relate to practices considered as leading to 'quality' code.


The interviewees were all University graduates with several years experience, some working in senior positions for multi-national companies, all supposedly pre-screened by head-hunters.

1. Not one had purchased books along the lines of 'Code Complete' or similar. There was one copy of 'Teach yourself C# in 24 hours'.
2. Not one read blogs on a regular basis. Not one was able to quote the name of a blogger that he / she read regularly.
3. One had used test-driven development overseas. Not one was familiar with continuous integration.
4. An astounding not one was required to use version control in their current positions, though some did use VSS.
5. Not one had heard of FxCop / StyleCop.
6. One had heard of patterns.


To cap it all one interviewee asked the purpose of my questions. When told that it was for general improvement he all but pounded on the desk, exclaiming that 'I have a computer degree and didn't need to know anything more'.:confused:


I will refrain from drawing any conclusions regarding the above: to [incorrectly] quote the 50's show 'Dragnet': 'just the facts'.
 
These days, IT professionals have to be more than having an MCSE and knowing what a network point is. It's working with finances, systems, people and probably lastly computers. The sooner we realise that IT professionals are just that - professional - the better.
As my manager always says - IT is more about counselling than about IT :)
 
Sure, but this doesn't take into account the fact that the CIO doesn't want the project, the project manager doesn't know the project and the project owner is stressed beyond belief trying to keep a straight face while he looks down every time you tell him that 'some unforseen requirement' will impact the project. "The unforseen requirement is something that is due to a legacy system you are interfacing with" you say, but he doesn't understand the jargon. While doing all of this, you have to maintain a system written by a developer who went job hopping and left his last project stranded against a brick wall, you need to attend daily update meetings where a task team questions various aspects of outstanding issues and the test team are complaining that you are not giving them enough of your time for them to work through their iterations. To top this, the crappy McAfee anti virus that the company force-installs on your PC is disalowing some socket connections and direct disk write access and you are not allowed to bypass it without proper authorization. You would have looked at this already, but because the IT Updates are busy installing on your PC, you are unable to use your PC for another 23 minutes. Incidently, the next bug meeting is 15 minutes from now and you are still unable to print a list of your changes because of the update.

..and that's just an everage daily snapshot. Still to come, your wife wants you to take friday off, you were a little late this morning because there was a stationary truck at the Allandale offramp and you have to leave early today because you have a parents evening at school.

Then, just as you are about to leave your phone rings and the operations guy on the other end of the line lets you know that they upgraded 'Data 1' from .NET 1.1 to .NET 3.5 and now remoting calls from 'Legacy 1' to 'Data 1' are failing with 'internal server errors'

It's all in a day's work really :)

Sounds like my daily routine
 
I work in virtualisation specifically and having spent 4 years in the UK certainly helped me find work in SA. My feeling is that we have this strange sense in SA that IT means being a techie, which is a rather backward viewpoint. These days, IT professionals have to be more than having an MCSE and knowing what a network point is. It's working with finances, systems, people and probably lastly computers. The sooner we realise that IT professionals are just that - professional - the better.
Hi there
Agree with you hammell, I have been doing It for 4 year starting in College,and i feel strongly that IT professionals should not be limited to just doing networks and fix pc's,
I don't limit myself ,because my motivational skill level is so high I will take on a big task not in my league and Ace it
 
Sure, but this doesn't take into account the fact that the CIO doesn't want the project, the project manager doesn't know the project and the project owner is stressed beyond belief trying to keep a straight face while he looks down every time you tell him that 'some unforseen requirement' will impact the project. "The unforseen requirement is something that is due to a legacy system you are interfacing with" you say, but he doesn't understand the jargon. While doing all of this, you have to maintain a system written by a developer who went job hopping and left his last project stranded against a brick wall, you need to attend daily update meetings where a task team questions various aspects of outstanding issues and the test team are complaining that you are not giving them enough of your time for them to work through their iterations. To top this, the crappy McAfee anti virus that the company force-installs on your PC is disalowing some socket connections and direct disk write access and you are not allowed to bypass it without proper authorization. You would have looked at this already, but because the IT Updates are busy installing on your PC, you are unable to use your PC for another 23 minutes. Incidently, the next bug meeting is 15 minutes from now and you are still unable to print a list of your changes because of the update.

..and that's just an everage daily snapshot. Still to come, your wife wants you to take friday off, you were a little late this morning because there was a stationary truck at the Allandale offramp and you have to leave early today because you have a parents evening at school.

Then, just as you are about to leave your phone rings and the operations guy on the other end of the line lets you know that they upgraded 'Data 1' from .NET 1.1 to .NET 3.5 and now remoting calls from 'Legacy 1' to 'Data 1' are failing with 'internal server errors'

It's all in a day's work really :)

The sort of thing that is beyond the university's ability to prepare students for :)
That is what you can only gain by actual working experience, but still good to have an idea that its stressful before you decide to pursue it as a career.
 
My feeling is that we have this strange sense in SA that IT means being a techie, which is a rather backward viewpoint. These days, IT professionals have to be more than having an MCSE and knowing what a network point is. It's working with finances, systems, people and probably lastly computers. The sooner we realise that IT professionals are just that - professional - the better.

IT does mean techie. IT Professional means developer. This is what always got to me. By definition professional means graduate. Find me one degree that shows you how to correctly design and implement a load balanced WAN infrastructure? I keep going on about this but my old business did IT services and was built on the premise that it serves people who happen to have computer problems/requirements. I can write code and so could half my staff but we didn't. We left that to the guys who were passionate about writing code. I always pointed my clients off to a couple companies that I had worked with over the years that believed the same as me when it came to doing work. Do it right first time. I often used to get feedback from these companies who were always glad when my company was involved on the infrastructure side because they 1. knew they were getting good reliable infrastructure and 2. they knew that nothing was getting upgraded ANYWHERE without thorough testing and 3. the support guys were not idiots. A damn nice position to be in. I also always enjoyed rolling out software that was not bloated and worked exactly like the requirement spec. The requirement specs were always drawn up in a consultative fashion between business, the dev (team, or dev head) and one of my guys. May not work for everybody but it worked damn well for us!

All I can say to somebody entering the whole IT environment is there is ALWAYS something you can learn. Sometimes from the least expected people/places. Do your time and if you are as good as you think you are you WILL rise to the top. It's a process. Some good advice in an earlier post is read, read everything. Read it twice. You don't need sleep, you need knowledge. :cool:
 
The truly brilliant candidates are usually not willing to blow their own trumpet and often neglect to tell you about their many great achievements, while the average guys are often more creative with their achievements, and tell you over and over and over....

It's called the Dunning-Kruger effect.
 
Unfortunately there is a massive gap between what you are taught and real world code.

Correct. Real world code is an abyss of horrible "copy-and-pasted" garbage. If we ever coded like this in varsity, we would have failed.

Some days I just want to rip my hair out when I see how bad the coding standards are where I work. It's so bad, I even asked senior management if I can start teaching coding standards and principles to the other devs!

Some days I wonder how our production environment is still running...

</rant>
 
Good god, where do I even start.

This article is so misleading and badly written it's not even funny. First of all, it says a drop in demand and then goes on to explain a lack of supply. Did the author study basic statistics? Did the author even complete high school?

Then it says "The challenging recruitment conditions are however not an indication of more job advertisement. Over the last twelve months the number of IT jobs declined by 67%, and indication of a far lower demand for IT professionals".

Based on what sources exactly? From the article it seems more like CareerJunction has less listings with them. Does that mean there are less jobs? Does that mean CareerJunction is going out of business? Does that mean the market demand is responding to the lack of supply? Does that mean companies are giving up bothering with recruitment agencies since they list so few candidates?

Seriously, MyBroadband "reporting" has been sub par for a while now but this article just tips the scales... Perhaps if you gave out real journalist names instead of "Staff Writer" it might lend a bit more credibility and responsibility to the authors...

Rather put this kind of trash writing under the title of "Blog" instead of "Tech News".

+ 1000000

Where do they source these "staff writers" from ...shocking

Couldn't agree more, HOWEVER: don't throw the baby out with the bath water - the discussions are very valuable and as a catalyst/ignition for these discussions the articles do suffice.

***

The issue that I have identified is that during the early nineties the IT salary bracket was a very desirable one. This led to an explosion of new 'roles', you know them well: your Business Analyst; your Project Manager etc.

Not that these roles did not exist prior to that but during that period non technical people saw those roles as their ticket into that very desirable salary bracket.

Now there is nothing wrong with that as long as you pay your dues and come up through the ranks. Unfortunately the vast majority of those people did not.
They didn't spend the requisite time learning through books; courses and experience.
They are to a large degree nothing more than spin doctors selling things higher up the chain of command to glorify themselves and not the project at large.
They are buck passers par-excellance.
...and big business has burnt their fingers more than once on these types.

This has served to dilute the industry.

Where once IT was the realm of real dyed in the wool techies and wizz-kids it is now in many ways the domain of GTI craving dickheads and its the true blue guys like many on this and other forums such as this that have paid the price for that dilution.
 
nah, I'll stick it out at my present company for a little while longer to see where this recession's heading.

No good applying for a new job, moving over, only to be told 6 months later that they are downsizing and can't afford me anymore.

And, yes, I'm in the market.

I've got good, solid, practical experience with computer hardware, networks, windows 2003, exchange 2003, windows xp, linux...

Think it's my age that throws them off.. I'm 40 at this stage.
 
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