How is the tech field? (health insurance, mortgage, daycare)

[jenlion]

Dunno. I've been very disappointed with people I've worked with. A coworker-friend tells me I just expect to much, but honestly, I'm costantly shocked by how ... dumb people are. They write resumes full of lies and exaggerations. If I put something on my resume, then darn it, I know how to do it. I don't get hired and they say, well, I don't do scripting.

I have been asked to do technical interviews at my current job. I have given more than one thumbs-down to the people they come up with, which are always friends or friends-of-friends of employees or family. Uh, yeah, the moron that worked for Accenture for a year and was chopped in the VERY FIRST ROUND of layoffs a few years back? That was the first clue. Follow up and all of her "database expertise" is playing around with Access once. (Our stuff runs on SQL). I called on it and recommended no-hire. They liked her "team spirit" and hired her anyway and she proceeded to completely decimate any reputation we had wherever she went.

She was sent to do a software upgrade once. Rather than ask for, say, the DISK that updates from one version to the next, she went out and she actually managed to find a table called Version. Know what she did? She opened it up and CHANGED THE VALUE IN THE TABLE from 6.3 to 7.2. Then she said, great! It's upgraded, right?

I know there are a lot of smart people out there. At least, I think there are. But honestly, people who are actually qualified to do technical work seem very few and very far between. It's sad, the vast majority of the so-called technical people I've worked with are lazy. They expect to be paid big bucks for pathetic, out-of-date abilities. They take forever to do the simplest things, and they don't want to learn anything new.

I'm quite uncomfortable with the mass importation of labor from other places, myself. I wish I wasn't, but I am. I've worked for a company where the majority of the employees were Asian, and I thought I could do it. Turns out it is just too damn hard to work every day within another culture. Burned me out after a year and a half and I hope I never get desperate enough to take another job like that. I'd love to be more enlightened or flexible, but it's just exhausting to deal with cultural crap on top of regular work crap (especially if the culture isn't so kind to women to begin with). That's the #1 reason I do not want to work at Microsoft myself. I don't think I could do it again.

But all things being equal, Microsoft needs people that aren't lazy and are capable. I think they've taken not-lazy to the EXTREME when people are working 18 hour days and can't keep up -- that's ridiculous. But how can I blame them? I wouldn't want to hire most of the kids coming out of school, and certainly not the ones twenty years older that are lazy and resting on their old stuff. (I had a manager bragging to me about her CS degree. She knows FORTRAN. Great. Happy for you. Do you understand the difference between an actual program and a script? Between a server/client architecture and a web-based one? No? Then don't pretend you know what the heck you're talking about anymore. You don't. Go use those management skills, not the technical ones). I'd actually take the kid willing to learn and try to do new things and work their way up over the older ones, which I'm rapidly becoming myself. Scary. It's not about the money -- it's about what you GET for the money.

End rant. Now I'm all sad.

[Heiwos]

Too funny! Yeah, you make some good points. When demand was highest, around Y2K, I had to teach a $25/hr guy in his 60s how to use a mouse. This was not 1980!

Though think whether things could have been different had the pay been higher. For example, also for Y2K Microsoft desperately need SAP (major accounting system) people, or else they'd be caught by the Y2K issue. Unfortunately for them, so did a lot of other Fortune 100 companies need those people. Solution? MS paid $400/hr. Guess what, they got all the competent people they needed.

I've worked with numerous people from India, China, Russia, and elsewhere. My take is that, in general, they are every bit as capable and I've had few communication or cultural issues (if anything, I think Americans have a lot to learn from other cultures).

A big reason why resumes include acronym dumps of things the applicant doesn't really know, is because many employers use automated acronym screens to decide who to interview. The more acronyms on the resume, the better chance of an interview, or something like that. When I did a lot of tech interviewing, almost every resume included C++. Most of the time with just one question I could ascertain that they had little or no experience in it. But I can't blame them for doing it.

[jenlion]

Just to clarify -- I wouldn't argue that people from other places are less capable. On the contrary -- if they've worked hard enough and are good enough to get here, chances are good they're among the top performers in their home countries. My difficulty was in leaving, breathing, eating, and working from 8 to 7 every day in essentially a foreign monoculture environment. I like to VISIT other countries, but I don't know that I'd like to LIVE anywhere else. Doesn't kill you, but it's ... just, well, hard. And that was my experience in that job: I couldn't deal (after 18 months of it) with the management culture, which was through-and-through Korean, the peer-culture (all Chinese, to a person), or with the constant difficulty communicating with people doing the warehouse work (all Hispanic). I was either stumbling trying to explain a shipping process on a new computer system with high-school Spanish; trying to convince someone to actually do their job without having me explain every last single step to them -- they CAN SO research and do the project themselves, which was apparently not encouraged when they were in school in China, as several of them took great pains to explain to me; or dealing with super-egotistical, know-your-place-you're-lucky-to-work-for-me, I'm-not-buying-software-because-they-don't-buy-it-in-China-so-why-should-I-you-need-to-just-steal-it management. I really, REALLY tried to work there because it was INTERESTING to eat lunch with people who'd come up from Mexico and Panama and hear their stories; it was INTERESTING to learn some Chinese and hear about why the guy from Taiwan was NOT "Chinese" and why the Mandarin accents were so different even from towns close together and how Hong Kong really belonged with China, thank you very much, always did, always would, even though they did not use the spoken word (cantonese) correctly at ALL; it was interesting (though less so) to hear about life in Seoul and how hard it was to raise a Korean kid here to count on their fingers "correctly" (you start with the thumb and the index finger is #2, not starting with the index finger and the thumb is #5, and that is VERY IMPORTANT). But then I had to listen to tirades about how people here don't understand the difference between attractive Korean women and less-attractive Korean women. We just see Korean and think, ah, beautiful! But that woman there, she is ugly, she should not be on TV, they just don't have good eyes here. And no, this is not just one "bad apple", this is an entire company's worth... it was exhausting. I came in with a too-open mind excited about the experience and boy did it go sour. You never know when you're stepping on a landmine, and you never know when people are going to balk at seamingly simple tasks because that's just not how things are done, you just have to plan every single thing to an exhausting level of detail and hope nothing blows up on you. Burns you out! I would hope that in a company like MS where the people ARE from all over the world that the individuals working there meet a common MS standard, rather than insisting on clinging to whatever worked where they came from. But from outside it sure looks like Indian monoculture to me. And even though the individual Indians I've worked with have been stellar (mostly), I don't want to have to live in another monoculture at work ever again!

[ijoe13]

Wow, Jen! You sound like what I sound like when I leave work every day. Except of the fact that it's not a cultural thing, but rather a "stupid people" thing.

I'm willing to learn new things, and would love to leave Cleveland and move to Seattle ASAP! I've been working with Dynamics as well for a few months... so I could be of some value to someone in the great Pacific NW.


Joe

[texastrigirl]

Joe, check out Volt.com. They do a lot of contract hiring at MS. I know they have cut back a bit on hiring but friends of mine that recruit there said they are ALWAYS looking for good people.

Jenlion, I had to laugh at the Accenture story. My husband and I have both worked in consulting with some BIG names and I can't count the number of times we were sold as "experts" when we had just taken a midnight crash course on the subject the night before the project after being staffed. GM paid $2500 a day for my husband for a Y2K project and he was fresh outta B-school. All he did was produce binders. That being said, we are both relatively bright at least in terms of grades and accomplishments and did our best and it usually turned out okay. But buyer beware of the consulting field in general and make sure you do background and reference checks. My husband had to do pretty specific interviews at Amazon.com to check his competency. It's a tough place to get hired at but he works with really bright people.

[drewba]

Originally Posted by Heiwos

This could easily be caused by offering too little. I haven't applied for a full-time position in a decade, because I could make a lot more by contracting. Every time I looked at full-time positions, they paid way less. Likewise, there's no shortage of American-citizen CEOs, since they get $mega-millions. When Gates says there's too few qualified tech workers, he means too few cheap workers.

It is possible that the pay was too low, but it wasn't listed on the job posting and we weren't even getting resumes or inquiries.

[Heiwos]

Originally Posted by drewba

It is possible that the pay was too low, but it wasn't listed on the job posting and we weren't even getting resumes or inquiries.

Likely most qualified people know that when the salary's not posted, it's low for sure, so they don't bother. My first question to recruiters: what's the rate? I've never believed in loyalty, or the exciting workplace opportunities or such fluff. Just pay me top dollar for excellent work, or let me go immediately if I'm not performing.

[seattlenextyear]

Recruiters usually ask you what your hourly rate is before you have a chance to ask them

[texastrigirl]

I was told by a friend in recruiting that a formula for figuring the hourly rate you should charge is something like what you think your annual salary should be (REASONABLY and not inflated by ego!...maybe do some market research) x 1.0765 (for FICA that employer would pay). Add an estimate for benefits offered ($12K to $15K on average) and divide by 2080 hours. Adjust up or down accordingly depending on supply of folks in your field. I have used that formula in the past after they have presented their hourly rate and I have been able to negotiate a bit higher than the initial offer.

[Heiwos]

Or try my method: Get some rate on the table by you or the recruiter, then find another recruiter and ask if they can beat it. If they can, go back to the first one and ask if they can beat it. Repeat. When the bidding stops, you have your best rate. I once had a recruiter call back and try to reduce a rate I had agreed to and made arrangements to meet & sign for, them claiming some B.S. about some cost they had forgot about, and then an hour later (after talking to another recruiter) the first one went up from their original offer. That was fun, and I went with the second one.