The IT Job Market Sucks!!
If you haven’t already figured it out, the IT job market sucks here in the good ole US of A.
Sure, many of you will say it’s the economy, the financial crisis we’re in now with massive foreclosures, failing banks, rising gas prices, and the uncertainty of who the next president will be. That certainly does play a factor in it, but I feel there is a much bigger issue facing all of us in IT careers.
A bit of history about ole Crusty Orange. Crusty has many years experience as a software developer. Crusty has held roles in all aspects of the software development lifecycle. He has held positions all the way from systems analyst all the way up to director. For the past couple of years, Crusty was the lead developer for several contracts for a federal contractor working with their government client. As most government contracts go, they are fixed price and the company with the lowest bid usually wins. I was allowed the luxury of telecommuting (it was a 3 hour drive each way to the office) since I had to move closer to my mother due to her failing health (she passed away in November 2007).
In July 2008, the phone rang, it was my boss, the conversation went something like this:
Boss: “ Hi Crusty, the contract is running out of money and we have had a hard time finding something to allow you to stay billable that you can work from home.”
Crusty: “I can commute into the office and pay for a hotel from Monday – Friday if necessary, as I mentioned before, my reason for telecommuting and living where I do, ending in November with my mom’s passing.”
Boss: “I didn’t know that, I forgot she had passed away.”
Crusty: “It would not be a problem for me to come in from Monday – Friday”.
Boss: “ Well, its too late, I’ve already submitted the termination paperwork to HR. You are being laid off. Please understand that you work was great, and this is in no way a reflection on your work or skills. We are going to give you 2 weeks severance to help you pay your bills.”
You are probably asking yourself why I am telling you this. Am I asking for pity? No. Do I want you to feel sorry for me? No. The point is that the boss made a decision possibly without considering all of the options that might have been available. Live and Learn.
After being laid off, I had some hard choices to make. There were NO computer jobs on the eastern shore of Maryland. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Not a single ad in the paper for a computer person in any position in over a month. All of the jobs were in the DC area which was a 3 hour commute each way.
I applied for a few jobs in DC, but they didn’t seem to want to deal with someone who lived 3 hours away or would have to relocate. They wanted someone local. I had to move.
My wife and I decided to move down to the Tampa Florida area as there seemed to be a decent amount of job activity, I was growing tired of government contracting, and the weather is a bit nicer. I sent our resumes before the move, but nobody wanted to talk to me about jobs until I rented/owned a house there.
Enough history, I have a house just outside Tampa and I am still unemployed 3 months later.
Reasons why the IT Industry sucks
1. Most jobs posted on Dice, Monster, Computer Jobs, Careerbuilder, Hot Jobs, etc. are placed by recruiters. Very few are direct hires. This means that it is hard to tell exactly how many REAL jobs there are.
2. Most recruiters operate on a percentage of your first years salary, so they will aim for the highest salary for you. While this is nice, it often knocks you out of consideration due to overpricing by the recruiter. I was once submitted for a job where the recruiter told his client I was asking for 100,000 to later find out they hired someone for 40,000
3. Recruiters are often not technical people, they do not know the technology so they often have a hard time understanding their client’s needs.
4. Recruiters will tell you that they all know the client very well, and if you talk to multiple recruiters about the same job, they sometimes refer to the hiring manager by different names!! Bob, Tom, Rick, etc.
5. I have received many calls from Recruiters about how impressed they are with my resume. They like the fact that I have both Windows .NET experience and Linux experience, but yet they only tell me about one job and I never hear from them again!
6. Right now I don’t think anyone is hiring until we figure out who the next president is and what impact that might have on the economy.
7. I’m sorry to say this, but the influx of foreign workers has driven down salaries for IT worker. If you are a foreign worker, ask for what you deserve! Don’t settle for 40,000 for a 80,000 job.
8. Last but not least, recruiters sometimes double submit you for a job. This happens when 2 recruiting companies submit you for the same job. This is a kiss of death, because the hiring manager doesn’t know who should represent you.
The above list sounds like I am down on recruiters, and for a large part, I am. I feel they are mostly responsible for the IT job market as it stands today. Sometimes direct-hire companies are to blame by not stating how much they are willing to pay, they will interview everyone regardless of salary and this is sometimes a huge waste of time for both parties.
Do you think the IT job market sucks? Why or why not? Let’s hear your thoughts on this.
Reader's Comments
I’m not a programmer I’m a technician doing mostly Windows desktop support and things are looking pretty bad. It seems like everybody wants you to know everything under the sun and pay you $15 per hour. After 10 years doing computer support I am for the first time thinking of seriously abandoning this business, unless you have the ability to work for yourself it’s an uphill climb.
The IT market is horrible. The hiring managers don’t know what they are talking about, and they don’t understand that someone who has the aptitude can learn what they need to know. If you know business and you know the basics of technology, then it is all about transferrable skills and the ability to learn new material and apply them to business ends. But the clowns who hire new employees look for a laundry list of material learned beforehand, and therefore they miss the point. IT is about business and you can’t know the individual business process beforehand, but they expect you to. Critical thinking skills make someone a good programmer/analyst, but hiring managers would rather hire a paper tiger. The Wright brother didn’t have a license to fly airplanes, but nobody will even give you a chance if you don’t have 500 years of experience.
I’ve been out of work for 9 months. 9 MONTHS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 9 LONG GD MONTHS! I graduated and nobody gave me the slightest chance. The next group of graduates will graduate, people who slacked off and took 5 years instead of 4 to graduate, and this darn American economy will still have failed to give me a flipping chance.
Start your business and grab the ‘ethical’ market share…a vertical model nobody in IT is targeting.
I was working in telecom until uncle sam said…”go to war or go to jail”. I was going to go to iraq for 15 months. I had no choice had to drop everything and leave.
Finally i got back, and everything(promotion structure, titles, pay grades) including first line management was replaced at my former job. I had no reason to stay because it was going to be as if i had never been there….start from scratch. I started grad-school full time. Now I graduated 2.5 months ago with a 3.8 GPA in IT mgmt Systems…and nobody wants to even interview me….
I was working for a shitty little company that cut me for a few dollars savings. They can’t all get the work they need done now and I can’t go back cause the a-holes are too proud to admit they fucked up.
I’ve been looking for work for almost 3 months. No hope in sight. I’m thinking that the IT field is a bad place to be because the dipshits that screen and the upper managers making the call to hire don’t know and never really knew what it really is that we in the IT filed actually do. They also don’t seem to have a clue about what it takes to get there…..pffft! Minimum wage my ASS!
The IT job market sucks for a number of reasons, some mentioned already. One thing I find annoying is the preponderance of contract jobs. There is a disconnect between academia and the professional world that used to be bridged by corporate training. On-the-job training seems to really be a thing of the past. Now you’re brought in with expectations of a certain minimum skill set, to perform a specific task, then they’re done with you and you search for someone else who wants to buy your labor commodity. If you’re established in a certain niche, this can work out well for you. But if you’re coming from outside, such as a recent graduate, it can be hard to break in. The old adage says “you gotta pay your dues” but the trouble seems to be that there’s fewer and fewer places to actually pay those dues, because those places would just rather hire a contractor who’s already an expert.
It can also be very easy to become typecast in the IT field. In my junior year of college I took an internship doing system admin and help desk type work, and ended up accepting a full time job there when I graduated. Heck, the pay was good and I liked the company, so why not? Flash forward 6 years later and I’ve progressed little in terms of my applied skill set, and am now further removed from the freshness of my academic experience. A lose-lose prospect, aside from being a comfortable job with good benefits. Golden handcuffs. But, even in searching for another job I now feel typecast as a Help Desk and System Admin type because that’s what my resumé post-college is built upon. I don’t know the best way to break into software development, always my true interest, because very few places are looking to direct-hire entry level programmers and no one really cares that you completed academic software projects 6 years ago. I guess I just need to build some experience developing little throw-away apps on my own time. I’m also starting to feel like going all “Office Space” and just ditching the computer field entirely.
As an IT professional (Sr. Systems Analyst) for the past six plus years, I have never seen things this bad. I have a good job, but have been looking to relocate for about 6 months now, and it is one ugly and unjust market. The longer that I search, the fewer jobs that I see. I’m appalled when I see a database admin position posted at 21k per year….that’s less than middle management makes at a Walmart, or Burger King. We are being forced into lower and lower wages with more and more responsibility due to a bad market.
IT is the worst field I’ve worked in. I used to work in Biology and sometimes wish I stayed. Coworkers are out to get each other and bosses are out to work you to death for peanuts. I have background in hardware, networking and systems. The hardware jobs don’t pay and the networking jobs want you to work a 70 hr a week schedule for 50,000 a year. So that comes out to about 7.75 an hour and your doctor bills will take up all of that. I am definitely getting out of this field.
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